The Past, Present, and Future of Mental Health Courts

Abstract

Mental health courts (MHCs) are an ever-growing popular solution to a well-documented problem—the overabundance of persons with mental illness in the criminal justice system. MHCs are but one of several types of specialty courts designed to improve the practices and effectiveness of criminal justice. This chapter summarizes what is known about past and present MHCs using the Council of State Governments’ (CSG) Ten Essential Elements of a Mental Health Court as a guiding framework (Thompson et al., Improving responses to people with mental illnesses: The essential elements of a mental health court, 2008). Then, what the next generation of MHCs may look like is forecasted on the basis of the trends, research, and ongoing controversies surrounding these specialty courts. At the end, a preliminary conclusion is offered that based on the progression of the courts—which are criminal justice inventions and entities—regressing back toward a more traditional criminalistic and even adversarial approach is a reasonable expectation. A question that remains to be addressed is whether MHCs and other specialty courts will continue to be “special.” How will they distinguish themselves from traditional courts? As the courts adopt a more legalistic and due process orientation, the challenge will be to retain the features that set them apart from treatment-as-usual in the criminal justice system, features that were created in response to the perceived ineffectiveness of said traditional treatment.