MENTALLY ILL VIOLINIST SAVED BY BEHAVIORAL HEALTH COURT
Kim Knoble, a gifted violinist with a promising future, plummeted into serious mental illness, drugs, and homelessness, halfway through a full-ride music scholarship at UC Irvine.
Instead of being locked up and set on a path to cycle through the system like so many others with mental illness in California, she was sent to San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court. Through court-supervised community treatment, Knoble reclaimed her life and her music.
The LA Time’s Lee Romney has this redemptive story. Here are some clips:
Kim Knoble’s past tracks an arc of promise, mental illness and descent into what her parents call “living hell.” But Knoble is not homeless, in prison or dead — outcomes common with stories like hers.
Instead, on Wednesday, the woman with a head of wild red curls plans to walk into the St. Francis Yacht Club, tell her tale of recovery and lift the instrument she did not touch for a decade to play Massenet’s “Meditation From Thais.”
Now 31, Knoble was mastering Mozart violin concertos by the time she hit middle school. As a high school senior, she played with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra — while doubling as concertmaster of its Marin counterpart.
Then, on a music scholarship at UC Irvine, her brain began to change.
She thought the FBI had tapped her phone, that Hollywood producers were sending her messages. She started using drugs. Years of difficulty followed: Hospitalization. Rehab. Relapse. Tough love. And homelessness.
What brought Knoble redemption was the crime she would commit. Agitated and off her medication two years ago, she pushed a 75-year-old man down the stairs of a city bus. He was injured. She was arrested.
But Knoble was fortunate. She was accepted into San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court, which in lieu of incarceration offers comprehensive treatment, housing, vocational services and more under the supervision of a Superior Court judge.
[SNIP]
A 2010 study examined San Francisco’s court and three others nationwide and found success. Though San Francisco’s served the highest proportion of participants with schizophrenia and the greatest percentage who committed crimes against people rather than property, it showed the greatest drop in rearrests compared with control groups — 39% to 7%.
San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said that before this program, released offenders might have to wait 45 days for follow-up appointments, by which time “they were back in jail.” In contrast, he said, Behavioral Health Court offers a seamless handoff from jail psychiatric services to outside helpers.
Skepticism initially ran high, but Adachi said he now considers it “one of the most successful start-up social experiments in criminal justice history.” Dist. Atty. George Gascon called it “a national model for its humane approach to treating clients who suffer from severe mental illness. We’ve enhanced public safety by reducing recidivism.”
We think that that last from DA George Gascon bears repeating, when he called the program that rescued Knoble, “a national model for its humane approach to treating clients who suffer from severe mental illness. We’ve enhanced public safety by reducing recidivism.”
WHY JUVENILE CURFEWS DO NOT WORK
Mike Males, Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), in an Op-Ed for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE) says youth curfews are ineffective, erring on the side of detrimental to kids and communities, and a major law enforcement resource-waster. Here’s a clip:
Studies of dozens of cities across the nation found no effect or bad effects following youth curfews. An 18-year analysis of 21 cities in California found youth curfews useless or worse. San Jose’s and Chicago’s periods of vigorous curfew enforcement coincided with persistent failure to reduce crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while curfew-free cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, New Haven and New York City had impressive crime declines. Even a study purporting to validate curfews — which failed to compare cities with and without them — inadvertently found criminal arrests of youth fell faster across the country in general than in cities that enforced curfews.
Understanding why curfews fail requires radically revising our entire view of young people perpetrated by law enforcement, interest groups, politicians, and the news media from Fox News on the right to The Nation on the left.
Imagine instead — however impossibly, given the drumbeat of fear — that teenagers in this country are not a mass of risk-happy thugs, gunners, rapists and bullies. Imagine that police bent on curfew enforcement could stop hundreds of teenagers late at night and find virtually no wrongdoing — just park basketball players, movie-going throngs, restaurant socializers; that is, young people enjoying their communities.
CJCJ’s journal analysis of 400 police citations found just that: Curfews function as remarkably effective tools to waste law enforcement resources removing law-abiding youths from public places, where youthful presence serves to deter crime. Urban scholarship from William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs to common knowledge in European and Latin American cities validate that the more folks on the streets, young or old, the safer the public space. A Toronto Mountie once laughed when I asked if the city had a youth curfew: “Maybe for six year-olds.”
MORE CRIMINAL JUSTICE BILLS
On Sunday, Gov. Jerry Brown finished up the last of the bill signing (and vetoing), making the final call on 36 bills.
Gov. Brown signed SB 569, a bill to combat false confessions from kids by requiring that all interrogations of juveniles suspected or accused of homicide be videotaped.
Brown also approved AB 651, legislation that will allow certain people who served a nonviolent felony sentence in county jail to have the felony expunged from their record.
Another signed bill, SB 618, will make the compensation process easier for California’s wrongfully convicted. Claimants will no longer have to re-prove their innocence to the state. Bill author Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) says on his website that of 132 exonerations in California since 2000, only 11 people have been compensated.
(You can find a list of the rest of Sunday’s bill decisions, including two prison education bills, here.)
On a far sadder note, over the weekend, Brown vetoed SB 744, a very important bill (previously pointed to here) that would have provided protections for kids that are transferred to community schools.