The national movement toward alternatives to jail programs for people with mental illness was implemented late last year in Los Angeles County.
The pilot program could dramatically change the landscape of the local justice and jail systems, said Karen Tamis of the Vera Institute of Justice, in a Los Angeles Times article.
“Los Angeles County has a real problem with people with mental health issues in the jail system,” Tamis said. “This could have a very significant impact on the jail population as a whole.”
“This is not a specialty court,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told reporter Marisa Gerber. “It’s a new template.”
Judge Steve Leifman, who helped start the Criminal Mental Health Project in Florida, said when the program started in 2000 the recidivism rate for low-level misdemeanor offenders with mental illness was 72 percent. Now it is down to 20 percent.
The Miami-Dade plan, which included training thousands of police officers on how to deal with people who have mental illnesses, cut the local jail population nearly in half, and allowed the county to close one of its facilities, Gerber reported.
“It’s time to stop bouncing people who are mentally ill and genuinely sick between the streets and our jails,” said Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey. “This is an unconscionable waste of human life and money.”
Getting prosecutors on board is often one of the biggest obstacles, said Leifman. “With her (Lacey) buying in to this, it makes it so much more likely to succeed.”
The program requires eligible defendants with serious mental health issues to go through a series of assessments and be paired with a case worker at San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center. The program’s participants will then be placed in transitional housing, reported Gerber.