Predictors of Criminal Justice Outcomes Among Mental Health Courts Participants: The Role of Perceived Coercion and Subjective Mental Health Recovery

Abstract

Internationally, one effort to reduce the number of people with serious mental illness (SMI) in jails and prisons is the development of Mental Health Courts (MHC). Research on MHCs to date has been disproportionately focused on the study of recidivism and re-incarceration over the potential of these problem-solving courts to facilitate mental health recovery and affect the slope or gradient of opportunity for recovery. Despite the strong conceptual links between the MHC approach and the recovery-orientation in mental health, the capacity for MHCs to facilitate recovery has not been explored. This user-informed mental health and criminal justice (MH/CJ) community-based participatory (CBPR) study assesses the extent to which MHC practices align with recovery-oriented principles and may subsequently affect criminal justice outcomes. We report on the experiences and perceptions of 51 MHC participants across four metropolitan Mental Health Courts. Specifically, the current study assesses: (1) how defendants’ perceptions of court practices, particularly with regard to procedural justice and coercion, relate to perceptions of mental health recovery and psychiatric symptoms, and, (2) how perceptions of procedural justice and mental health recovery relate to subsequent criminal justice outcomes. The authors hypothesized that perceived coercion and mental health recovery would be inversely related, that perceived coercion would be associated with worse criminal justice outcomes, and perceptions of mental health recovery would be associated with better criminal justice outcomes. Results suggest that perceived coercion in the MHC experience was negatively associated with perceptions of recovery among MHC participants. Perceptions of “negative pressures,” a component of coercion, were important predictors of criminal justice involvement in the 12-month period following MHC admission, even when controlling for other factors that were related to criminal justice outcomes, and that an increase in procedural justice was associated with a decrease in symptoms but curiously not to an increase in attitudes toward recovery. Implications and future directions are discussed.