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Mental Health Court

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Mental Health Court
Criminology Course Paper Title Page
Mentally Ill Criminals and Mental Health Court
LaToya Bruns
DeVry University
Part One: Introduction to Mentally Ill Criminals
Are the mentally ill consider criminals? Are all criminals mentally ill to some extent? I wouldn’t say all but I think that it depends on the extent of the crime when comes to someone that has already been diagnosed as mentally ill. Committing a crime without actually knowing that you are doing it would be a different case for a mentally ill person. In discussing mentally ill criminals, I have to discuss mental health courts. I also feel like there should Police officers that deal directly with mental illness, they don’t understand how to deal with them.
According to the mayo …show more content…
The first mental health court was established in Florida in 1997 with California implementing its first mental health courts in 1999. Mental health courts are established to make more effective use of limited criminal justice and mental health resources, to connect individuals to treatment and other social services in the community, to improve outcomes for offenders with mental illness in the criminal justice system, to respond to public safety concerns, and to address jail overcrowding and the disproportionate number of people with mental illness in the criminal justice …show more content…
A definite con in the mental health court system is the number of mentally ill people that have been killed in the last year. I read one story about a woman that was mentally ill and had a hand drill that she was using, police were called and the woman was shot to death because the police assumed it was an Uzi and it was broad daylight. That’s just one story. There have been at least 14 men and women with a mental illness killed in the last year. In last year’s case, there was a mentally ill woman that stabbed her grandma to death and then told the courts that she could kill again. That woman walked away free. Is mental illness a way out for getting away with murder? There should be training on the proper way to deal with someone mentally ill who has become
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