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Life's Hurried Tangled Road: A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Analysis Of Why Dedicated Counsel Must Be Assigned To Represent Persons With Mental Disabilities In Community Settings, Alison Lynch, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

This paper will be published as part of a symposium issue of Behavioral Sciences and Law.

Although counsel is now assigned in all jurisdictions to provide legal representation to persons facing involuntary civil commitment, such counsel is rarely available to persons with mental disabilities in other settings outside the hospital. In this paper, we strongly urge that such representation also be made available to this population in community settings. The scope of this representation must include any involvement with the criminal justice system that currently does not fall within the scope of indigent counsel assignment decisions such as Gideon v. …

Had To Be Held Down By Big Police: A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective On Interactions Between Police And Persons With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin, Alison Lynch

Articles & Chapters

It is a truism that the largest mental health facilities in the nation are the nation’s largest urban jails. Most of the predictable solutions that are offered to curb the influx of individuals with mental illness into jails -- especially those that urge the loosening of civil commitment standards and the return to large psychiatric institutions -- are dreary at best, unconstitutional at heart, and mean-spirited at worst. However, we pay remarkably little attention to one of the primary causes of this reality: the decisionmaking processes "on the street" by police officers who choose to apprehend and arrest certain cohorts …

Wisdom Is Thrown Into Jail: Using Therapeutic Jurisprudence To Remediate The Criminalization Of Persons With Mental Illness, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The common wisdom is that there are two related villains in the saga of the “criminalization of persons with mental illness”: the dramatic elimination of psychiatric hospital beds in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the “civil rights revolution,” and the failure of the deinstitutionalization movement. Both of these explanations are superficially appealing, but neither is correct; in fact, the causal link between deinstitutionalization and criminalization has never been rigorously tested. It is necessary, rather, to consider another issue to which virtually no attention has been or is being paid: the near-disappearance of mental status issues from the …