A caring approach to fighting crime

When it started, Rob was just 21 years old and living the life many thought impossible for the reserved kid from a string of broken homes.

He had a good job downtown, a newborn son, a house in the suburbs. And no idea how quickly he could lose it all.

It began to unravel one afternoon on the job.

Feelings of nervousness and uncertainty overwhelmed him. He struggled to breathe, and tasks that normally took minutes were taking hours.

Auditory hallucinations kicked in.

The episode, brought on by what he would later learn was schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, was just the beginning.

Over the next six years, the 28-year-old from Woodstock would lose his job, lose contact with his son and lose his home. He began abusing alcohol and was hospitalized as many as 20 times for psychotic episodes.

The downward spiral hit rock bottom in June when police arrested him on a battery charge after a female acquaintance accused him of unwanted touching.

That low point, however, turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for him.

Appearing in court months later, Rob was given a choice: Take a plea deal, pay a fine and spend time on court supervision, or join McHenry County's new mental-health court and deal with close monitoring from court officials, mandatory counseling and tight restrictions on almost every facet of his life.

Looking back today, Rob says it was easy to choose the more difficult path.

"If I didn't, I think I'd be letting my life pass me by," he said. "I probably wouldn't be doing anything."

Now he is doing plenty.

When not meeting regularly with counselors and court officials in the now year-old program, Rob is working in a job set up through the program and participating in workshops so that he eventually can teach English as a second language.

He plans to begin taking classes at McHenry County College in the fall, thanks to a $1,000 scholarship he earned through the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

And he is fighting through the courts to win back his relationship with his now 8-year-old son.

None of that would be possible, he said, if not for his decision to join the mental-health court.

"They're helping me get my life back," he said. "When I look at how fast things got bad in my life, and how many years I did nothing about it, I can't believe it."

Program on the rise

As much as it is a success, Rob's story is not unique, according to backers of mental-health courts. And that success, they say, is fueling a nationwide surge in special courts established to deal with mentally ill offenders.

In 1997, just four mental-health courts were known to exist in the country. Today, there are more than 175, including mental-health courts in McHenry, Cook, Lake, Kane and DuPage counties.

It is a trend bolstered as much by early successes of the first mental-health courts in places like Broward County, Fla., and Allegheny County, Pa., as it is by necessity.

With the downsizing or outright shuttering of government-funded mental-health hospitals and programs in the 1980s and 1990s, the criminal justice system became home to more and more mentally ill people.

According to a 1999 study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, as many as 16 percent of those incarcerated in this country suffer some sort of mental illness. A more recent study at the Cook County jail found 7.4 percent of the men and 12.2 percent of the women incarcerated there to be mentally ill, figures far greater than what you would find outside the walls in the general population.

"The court system had become a dumping ground," said Judge Charles Weech, who presides over McHenry County's mental-health court. "And the more we've dealt with these people, the more we realized there had to be a better way. You really see that if not for their mental illness, these people would not be in the system."

That, combined with the high cost of housing mentally ill people in jails and prisons, led to a philosophical shift in how society believes it should treat people whose criminal acts are the result of mental illness, said Dr. Fred Osher, director of health systems and service policy at the Council of State Governments Justice Center.

"There is a new willingness to see that treatment as an alternative to incarceration is not only good for the individual but good for public safety," Osher said. "Nobody wants to spend money and not get good results, and that's what was happening with the old method of incarcerating people with mental illness and not providing treatment."

How it works

John Sterling, 76, of Crystal Lake was arrested in July 2006 on a charge of unlawful possession of a stolen motor vehicle.

Court records say he took an SUV for a test drive and decided not to return it. He later was found in the vehicle parked near the Woodstock Square, the SUV stuffed with personal items.

About two weeks later Sterling was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and ordered held at the Elgin Mental Health Center.

After being found fit in late 2006, he was admitted into the mental-health court around June 2007. He's now out of custody and getting regular counseling.

Program officials report that he has made it into phase three of the program, which is one step below the final phase before graduating. They say he's been a "stellar" participant and a poster child for how mental-health courts can make a difference.

The idea behind the special courts is simple: Instead of sending mentally ill people who have committed nonviolent offenses to jail, let them choose treatment.

New participants, who must volunteer for the program and pass through a screening process, meet almost daily with counselors and court officials. Some court participants live at home; others live in group homes run by agencies like the Pioneer Center for Human Services in McHenry.

They must abstain from alcohol and unprescribed drugs. They must adhere to a tightly structured treatment plan that, especially at first, governs nearly every aspect of their lives.

In McHenry County, participants must pass through four phases, each a little less restrictive and intense than the one before it. In all, a participant in the court is expected to spend 18 to 24 months in the program.

"To successfully complete this program involves doing much more than what most people charged with one of these crimes go through," said McHenry County State's Attorney Louis Bianchi, one of the court's first advocates. "This is hard work for them."

Consequences of violating the treatment range from losing one's television privileges or writing an essay, to jail time or dismissal from the program and a return to the regular court system.

"The most important part is the court's leverage in linking them to treatment services," Osher said. "It provides them with the incentive to get help."

The payoff, proponents say, is substantial: less crime, better lives for participants and lower costs for taxpayers.

Emerging proof

Although no widespread studies of mental-health courts' effectiveness have been published, two more focused studies have shown promising results.

One, published last year by the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that participants in the San Francisco mental-health court were less likely to commit another crime, particularly a violent crime, than others who passed through the regular court system.

A second study of the Allegheny County, Pa., program found it saved taxpayers money either through reducing the cost of jailing mentally ill offenders or reducing their criminal acts.

Closer to home, DuPage County's mental-health court, around since about 2000, has led to a significant drop in crimes committed by the mentally troubled offenders who once revolved in and out of the criminal justice system, State's Attorney Joe Birkett said.

"It gives these people a chance to be good citizens again," Birkett said. "By addressing the underlying causes, the symptoms -- the criminal acts -- go away."

Although it's too soon for proponents to talk about recidivism and crime rates in McHenry County, they proudly note that not one of the court's 16 participants so far has been arrested since joining the program.

But ultimately those who run the court say its success can't be measured simply by dollars saved or arrests prevented. The success, they say, will be gauged by how many people they remove from the unnecessary cycle of crime and incarceration.

"A success is someone who is no longer damaging himself or the community," Weech said. "The whole idea is to stop the revolving door, and that's what it's been for a lot of these people."