Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System Essay

moral Illness and the Criminal Justice System - Essay Examplejustice system and on the offenders themselves, the options which are available for such offenders to be treated and corrected, how the psychiatric services, the community and other agencies can help to successfully combat the problem are reviewed and solutions are sought in this paper.Hiday (p.508) states that there are three subgroups of persons with consummate(a) amiable sickness who come into contact with the criminal justice system 1) Those committing only misdemeanor offences that ofttimes involve survival behaviors 2) Those with accompanying character disorders who also abuse alcohol and drugs, both of which contribute to their blue rates of criminal offenses, arrests and incarceration 3) A much smaller subgroup who fit the stereotypical image of a severely disordered person driven to criminally violent actions by delusions. All three groups exsert in impoverished communities where it is difficult to survive with a major moral illness. After the failure of other social institutions, the criminal justice system is left to deal with the mentally ill person.Understanding federalism the fundamental interaction among national, state and local governments becomes crucial to understanding mental health policy development. From the earliest days of the republic, mental health care was a sector operating in the intersection of state and local levels of government. The approaching of Medicaid and Medicare in the 1960s, coupled with the national community mental health center (CMHC) program eventually created a major federal presence in financing mental health services. Yet the role of states and mental health communities within the mental health system continued alongside such initiatives, and in almost ways was elaborated by the partnership required by some of the services (Rochefort 467).According to the symptomatic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Assoc iation (DSM-IV), the term serious mental illness refers to diagnosable mental, behavioral or