During the 1960s, under then-governor Ronald Reagan, California made the decision to deinstitutionalize most of those state residents who were suffering from some kind of mental or emotional illness or challenge.
For too many years, struggling Californians had been institutionalized wrongly, or for too long, or against their will, or without competent treatment, or all of the above.
The 1967 passage of the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act ended most forms of lengthy forced commitment for people with mental illnesses, and established the right to due process in nearly all cases before commitment could take place.
This new legislation served to empty out most of the state’s mental hospitals.
Coincidentally, it also saved a lot from the state’s budget.
The idea was that most of those who needed treatment would go to community facilities, which sounded good in theory. But, with rare exceptions, the community facilities never materialized. So instead an ever-growing number of people struggled on their own, or with overwhelmed and ill-equipped families. Many self-medicated, became homeless, and sometimes crossed the legal line, often repeatedly, as an artifact of their illness and trauma.
It didn’t help that, as time went on, co-incidental to this anti-institutional movement was the rise of the drug war, followed by the law-and-order period of the 1980s and the 1990s, where mandatory minimums and new sentencing “enhancements” became the fashion.
The result was overfilled prisons and jails that also served, by default, as treatment facilities — famously turning LA County’s jail system into the nation’s largest mental institution.
Now, according to a remarkable new report, after decades of having a “community safety strategy that is organized around police and punishment,” Los Angeles County has reached a unique moment of consensus, that a new approach is needed.
Wherever one stands politically on crime and justice, it is undeniably true that our jails are over-filled with people struggling with homelessness, poverty, mental illness, and addiction.
These are human conditions that the justice system is not equipped to deal with well, the report points out. These are also not conditions that law enforcement is best suited to deal with either, although we unfairly have continued to drop the responsibility in the laps of our police and sheriffs departments.
The result has been, according to the new report, “far too many people cycling in and out of jail” instead of getting the support and healing they need to lead healthy and productive lives.
With all of the above in mind, a little over a year ago, on February 12, 2019, the LA County Board of Supervisors instructed the Office of the CEO to create the public-private county workgroup that would come to be called Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).
This 25-member ATI Working Group was to be charged with developing a “road map,” together with an “action-oriented framework and implementation plan,” to create a countywide system that would be designed to provide care and services first, and to use jail as the last resort.
Now, a little over a year later, the ATI group is back with a 98-page final report that includes 114 recommendations, organized under five “foundational” strategies, and which was officially accepted by the LA County Board of supervisors on Tuesday, March 10.
Also on Tuesday, and perhaps more importantly, the board voted on a new motion authored by Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas, which — after adopting the ATI’s five main strategies — asks the CEO to take the initial steps of instituting a larger plan that is designed to make the ATI’s recommendations a reality, and thus begin to build a countywide system of “alternatives to incarceration.”
A second unanimously passed motion co-authored by Supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn that added to and further refined what the CEO is being asked to do to get the ATI ball rolling.
Graphic notetaking image above developed at the ATI Community Engagement Workshop led by Community Coalition in South Los Angeles. Image developed by Graphic Footprints and live artist Dayna Bowers.
That term “peee reviewed” is supposed to magically evoke a sense of legitimacy and validate the study. Maybe at one point in time it did but not in this stste.
With California professors and university professors being so unabashedly biased (we all remember the UC Berkeley incidents) I do not put any faith in the neutrality or objectivity of this or any other socio/political related study out of any State University in this state. It’s self serving to it’s political masters its far left Sacramento. I’m sure these same “researchers” think Bernie Sanders is a good candidate for President and that Socialism is a plausible and workable form of government, even though it’s an “ideal” and has been proven and shown never to have worked.
Not buying this.
Just as CNN and LA Times were once considered the “go to” media outlets and “gold standard” of objective, unbiased reporting so have CA Public Universities lost their standing as a political, fair minded institutions of higher learning.
[…] Celeste Fremon is editor of WitnessLA . This is a slightly condensed version of an article reprinted with permission from the California Justice Report, a weekly roundup of news and views from California and beyond, published by WitnessLA. Read the full article here. […]
Celeste:
Why not moderate Trumpf from Dumbpuquistan comments out of your extremely well documented and footnoted essays? They all like Judge Amy Coney Barrett, because she is a Wind Up Squeaky Voiced Controllable Barbie Doll Clone. she is also a misogynist beast. She took away a $6.5 million dollar verdict from a Milwaukee 19-year-old young lady who was repeatedly raped in a juvenile facility before and after she gave birth. She joined another Indiana Klansman Daniel Manion rated the worst judge to sit on the 7th Circuit ever. I watched his Dan Quayle Judiciary Committee hearing. He was asked about the heaviest case he had ever tried. He answered: An appeal of a mechanic’s small claims loss. I about dropped dead. Shocked such a fool was able to sit on the 7th Circuit. Another RETHUGLICAN incompetent.
A True Salem Witch Hunt victim resurrected as a Happy Live Survivor in this life, if she obeys her masters as a Handmaiden People of Praise Christofascist. If not Judge Amy goes back in the pond to be drowned in the pond as a Salem Witch in a Kangaroo Court as she will be on with Fellow Goony Bar Denizens from Star Wars.
A woman in 2020 who opposes birth control and Griswold v Connecticut? What woman who has ever seen what another woman goes through going to a Mexican butcher in LA Downtown to have a hit or miss coat hanger abortion, while rich RETHUGLICAN women go to BH, Palos Verdes, Montecito, Santa Monica, Indianapolis, Boston, Dallas, Bismarck, Des Moines, Louisville, Birmingham, OKC, Little Rock, Dipstick HawleyYes–KC, Lincoln, Jackson, Nawlins–Yes, Dipsticks–Kennedy and wannabe Hopalong Cassady, private OB/GYN doctors without clinic attachments or visits to propaganda not to have an abortion counselor to have a ten-minute procedure done with or without Daddy’s knowledge for cash or added on her insurance bill as another charge hidden from Blue Cross, Aetna, or Medicare even sometimes.
Surprise McBitch, Hawley, Fischer, Capito, Ernst, Hyde-Smith, Blackheart, Lee, Rubio, Exorcized Cruz, Comatose Cornyn, Dead Men Walking Roberts & Inhofe, Hombres Muertos Cominandos, and Black Irish concealed assets Sullivan.