This article presents the findings and methodology of a four-site, prospective, longitudinal, quasi-experimental evaluation of mental health courts (MHCs), which generally provide court-supervised community-based mental health treatment for justice-involved individuals.
Mental health courts share some common features, but their implementation varies widely by jurisdiction, by judge, and across time. Consequently, single-site evaluations of the effectiveness of MHCs in meeting their primary objective of enhanced public safety are limited by the idiosyncrasies of a particular court. For innovative interventions to become evidence-based practices, research must progress from studies of single courts to those involving multiple courts and address other methodological limitations. The current study sought to overcome many of the identified methodological limitations of previous MHC evaluations. To be included in this study, the four courts selected were required to be sufficiently large to have a substantial caseload from which to draw a sample, to have operated long enough to have stability, and to represent a range of types of courts that might differ on some policies. Differences could include level of sanctioning and types of defendants, such as both misdemeanor and felony cases. In addition, the courts had to be in jurisdictions with large county jails to ensure sufficient sampling for the treatment-as-usual (TAU) group. The public-safety outcomes measured were number of new arrests, annualized arrest rates, and county jail and state prison incarceration days. Overall, this first multisite, prospective study of MHCs offers encouragement that they can achieve the public safety outcomes that funders and the public want. The data, however, do not comprehensively address the key issues of the types of offenders most likely to benefit from the MHC or what mechanisms produce positive outcomes. These important questions await further data from this and other studies. 25 references