Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System - Essay Example

justice system and on the offenders themselves, the options which are available for such offenders to be treated and corrected, how the psychiatric services, the community and other agencies can help to successfully combat the problem: are reviewed and solutions are sought in this paper. Hiday (p.508) states that there are three subgroups of persons with severe mental illness who come into contact with the criminal justice system: 1) Those committing only misdemeanor offences that often involve survival behaviors 2) Those with accompanying character disorders who also abuse alcohol and drugs, both of which contribute to their high rates of criminal offenses, arrests and incarceration 3) A much smaller subgroup who fit the stereotypical image of a severely disordered person driven to criminally violent actions by delusions.

All three groups live in impoverished communities where it is difficult to survive with a major mental illness. After the failure of other social institutions, the criminal justice system is left to deal with the mentally ill person. Understanding federalism: the interaction among national, state and local governments becomes crucial to understanding mental health policy development. From the earliest days of the republic, mental health care was a sector operating in the intersection of state and local levels of government.

The advent of Medicaid and Medicare in the 1960s, coupled with the national community mental health center (CMHC) program eventually created a major federal presence in financing mental health services. Yet the role of states and mental health communities within the mental health system continued alongside such initiatives, and in some ways was elaborated by the partnership required by some of the services (Rochefort: 467). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), the term serious mental illness refers to diagnosable mental, behavioral or