Legal "rites": criminalizing the mentally ill

1. Because of more stringent civil commitment criteria, persons formerly hospitalized on a civil commitment now enter the system on criminal observation orders, having been arrested, booked, and often jailed for minor offenses such as vagrancy, shoplifting, or disorderly conduct. This represents a criminalization of the mentally ill. 2. In a single forensic system (Wisconsin) there was an increase of 73% in such commitments following court decisions and legislative revisions setting forth new commitment criteria. This increase was principally in criminal observations, although this rise was evident as well in "unable to stand trial" commitments. It was not present in "not guilty by reason of insanity" adjudications. 3. Aside from the obvious untoward effects per se of criminalizing mentally ill persons, other untoward effects occur in terms of prolonging hospitalization, depriving those persons of prompt treatment, and putting unnecessary and inhumane pressures on the family and the community, as well as on the mentally ill person himself. 4. The "freedom" to the penniless, helpless, ill, and finally arrested, jailed and criminally committed is not freedom at all--it's abandonment. The "right" to be demented, agonized and terrorized in the face of treatment which cannot, because of legal prohibition, be applied is no right at all--it's a new form of imprisonment. The "liberty" to be naked in a padded cell, hallucinating, delusional, and tormented, is not liberty--it is a folie à deux between pseudo-sophisticated liberals and an unrealizing public. The delusion is that if one changes the name of something to something else, or if one substitutes a jail for a hospital or a preoccupation with legal rites for honest concern over patients' rights, he has done something significant, useful and important, or at least something.