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Journal ArticleDOI

Effectiveness of a Mental Health Court in Reducing Criminal Recidivism and Violence

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TLDR
It is shown that participation in the mental health court program was associated with longer time without any new criminal charges or new charges for violent crimes and maintenance of reductions in recidivism and violence after graduates were no longer under supervision of themental health court.
Abstract
Objective: In response to the large-scale involvement of people with mental disorders in the criminal justice system, many communities have created specialized mental health courts in recent years. However, little research has been done to evaluate the criminal justice outcomes of such courts. This study evaluated whether a mental health court can reduce the risk of recidivism and violence by people with mental disorders who have been arrested. Method: A retrospective observational design was used to compare the occurrence of new criminal charges for 170 people who entered a mental health court after arrest and 8,067 other adults with mental disorders who were booked into an urban county jail after arrest during the same interval. A matching strategy based on propensity scores was used to adjust analyses for nonrandom selection into mental health court. Results: Propensity-weighted Cox regression analysis, controlling for other potential confounding variables (demographic characteristics, clinical variables, and criminal history), showed that participation in the mental health court program was associated with longer time without any new criminal charges or new charges for violent crimes. Successful completion of the mental health court program was associated with maintenance of reductions in recidivism and violence after graduates were no longer under supervision of the mental health court. Conclusions: The results indicate that a mental health court can reduce recidivism and violence by people with mental disorders who are involved in the criminal justice system.

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Citations
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African American women and mental well-being: The triangulation of race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

TL;DR: The authors distinguishes stressors, stress, and distress in the interest of bringing the use of these terms more into line with the way they are used in the stress literature and to reduce the problems of inconsistent usage prevalent in the discussion of stress in everyday life.
Journal ArticleDOI

Why do mental health courts work? A confluence of treatment, support & adroit judicial supervision

TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that although treatment and psychosocial services should be supplied within an evidence-based framework, neither of the two leading conceptual models are empirically proven with offenders who suffer from mental disorders.
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CATCH Court: Changing Actions to Change Habits—A Preliminary Evaluation Study

TL;DR: The Changing Actions to Change Habits (CATCH) specialized docket in Franklin County, Ohio as discussed by the authors was used for human-trafficking victims, including victims of sexual exploitation.
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Beyond the “Revolving Door?”: Incentives and Criminal Recidivism in a Mental Health Court:

TL;DR: In this article, a mixed-methods approach was used to evaluate the effectiveness of one specialized mental health court (MHC) on different measures of criminal recidivism with logistic regression, event history analysis, and negative binomial regression.
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No Soldier Left Behind: The Veterans Court Solution.

TL;DR: The history of problem solving court implementation and the functioning of an established veterans court are traced and the experience, insights and suggestions of the members of the court are examined.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

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Paul R. Rosenbaum, +1 more
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Journal ArticleDOI

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TL;DR: Propensity score weights estimated using boosting eliminate most pretreatment group differences and substantially alter the apparent relative effects of adolescent substance abuse treatment.
Journal ArticleDOI

Estimation of Causal Effects using Propensity Score Weighting: An Application to Data on Right Heart Catheterization

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider methods for estimating causal effects of treatments when treatment assignment is unconfounded with outcomes conditional on a possibly large set of covariates, and apply these methods to data on the effects of right heart catheterization (RHC) studied in Connors et al.
Book

Rethinking Risk Assessment: The MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder and Violence

TL;DR: Rethinking Risk Assessment as discussed by the authors is a pioneering investigation that challenges preconceptions about the frequency and nature of violence among persons with mental disorders, and suggests an innovative approach to predicting its occurrence.
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The results indicate that a mental health court can reduce recidivism and violence by people with mental disorders who are involved in the criminal justice system.