Does Bail Reform Decarcerate Mental Illness? Public Health Challenges for a Large County Jail System with Keiki Hinami, MD, as lead author, and CWTA’s Ann Cibulskis as co-author
CWTA Board member Ann Cibulskis is co-author of an article recently released in the Journal of Correctional Health Care:Volume 28, Number 4, 2022. The article is Does Bail Reform Decarcerate Mental Illness? Public Health Challenges for a Large County Jail System with Keiki Hinami, MD, as lead author.
Summary:
The Illinois Bail Reform Act of 2017 was intended, in the words of the bill’s legislative sponsor, to repair the criminal justice system by ‘‘ensuring incapacitation is reserved for those who are threats to public safety, not those who are poor or suffer from mental health or substance abuse challenges.’’ The act includes elimination of monetary bail for nonviolent offenses, the right to legal counsel at initial bond hearings, and authorization for the pretrial use of an assessment tool looking at defendants’ risk of failure to appear in further legal proceedings or of threat to others. This allows judges broad authority to waive monetary bail ‘‘based on the mental health of the person’’ (Bail Reform Act, 2017, p. 14).
Elimination of cash bail is only for nonviolent offenses. Research shows that there is no causal link between serious mental illness and violent behavior (See a recent meta-analysis of research: Mental Health and Violence: Is There a Link?
The Justice and Mental Health Collaborative Program in Cook County conducted a study to assess the potential impact of Illinois bail reform policies on diverting people with serious mental illness from Cook County Jail. Cook County Health (CCH) led the development of a way to measure serious mental illness and estimate the prevalence of mental health conditions in jail based on the jail’s electronic health records. Total jail registrations were compared to the subset of people with severe mental illness and co-occurring substance use disorder.
While there was a decline in total jail registrations during the period studied, admission of individuals with serious mental illness showed no decline. This led to the proportion of admissions of persons with serious mental illness increasing between 2015 and 2019 from 26% to 35%. These empirical findings demonstrate that successful jail diversion efforts culminating in Illinois Bail Reform are not being felt by individuals with serious mental illness.
The study findings strongly imply that bail reform legislation alone is not likely to reduce the prevalence of serious mental illness in jail, and intentional cross-sector agency participation is needed to accelerate culture change in the court system.
Read the full article here.
