New Approaches to Preventing Incarceration of Severely Mentally Ill Adults

By J. Steven Lamberti, M.D.
| June 1, 2004

Dr. Lamberti is associate professor of psychiatry and associate chair for clinical programs at the University of Rochester Medical Center. His research interest is in developing community-based treatment strategies to prevent jail recidivism among adults suffering from schizophrenia.

Collaborate with local criminal justice representatives. Actively seek opportunities to collaborate with police, probation and parole officers, and judges whenever they become involved with your patients. Enlist their support of the treatment plan, including the use of legal leverage to promote adherence when necessary.

Conclusions

Preventing unnecessary arrest and incarceration of severely mentally ill adults is a major challenge that requires coordination of mental health and criminal justice services. The goal of such coordination is ultimately to promote engagement of people suffering from severe mental illness in community-based care. It should be noted that close monitoring of treatment by criminal justice representatives has been associated with increased incarceration rates in some programs due to technical violations (Solomon et al., 2002). To prevent this problem, it is essential that diversion programs function as intensive treatment and support programs rather than simply as extensions of the criminal justice system. Research is needed to further develop and evaluate the effectiveness of these new combined models of service delivery.

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