Mental Health Court

Recent crimes around the city have brought mental health issues to the public’s attention.  For a long time, I have worked to get mentally ill offenders into treatment, where the illness underlying their criminal activity can be addressed. 

In 1998, I launched a new and innovative program called TADD, or Treatment Alternatives for the Dually Diagnosed, based on the idea that if we could get mentally ill offenders into treatment and off drugs, they would be less likely to be rearrested than those left untreated and sent to prison. Since it started, TADD has placed more than 1,000 mentally ill offenders into treatment. 

Based on TADD’s success, in 2002 New York State’s Chief Judge, Judith S. Kaye, decided to use Brooklyn to try opening the state’s first felony Mental Health Court, which has now helped more than 400 mentally ill people get treatment. Of those who entered TADD and the Mental Health Court in 2002, 79 percent had no new arrests two years after completing the program. 

The Brooklyn Mental Health Court combines the skills and expertise of mental health and criminal justice professionals to identify, evaluate and treat offenders’ mental illnesses. We can then balance the offender’s mental health needs with the need to protect public safety, and monitor the offenders as they undergo treatment. 

Mental Health Courts reduce criminal recidivism, drug addiction and homelessness. Unfortunately, there are not enough high-quality mental health treatment centers, with residential facilities and the ability to address the multiple needs of people suffering from serious and persistent mental illnesses and the array of other issues that often go along with them, including substance abuse, homelessness and HIV/AIDS. 

For more information about mental health courts, visit http://www.courtinnovation.org/.

First Assistant District Attorney Anne J. Swern oversees TADD and cases that go through the Brooklyn Mental Health Court. Assistant District Attorney David Kelly prosecutes cases in the Mental Health Court.
 

    ANNE J. SWERN                                                                       

Anne J. Swern is the First Assistant District Attorney to Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes.  She has been a prosecutor for 27 years. Ms. Swern currently supervises more than 1,000 employees in the DA’s Office. She oversees three substance-abuse treatment courts, the Red Hook Community Justice Center and the Mental Health Court. In addition, she is in charge of the nationally acclaimed Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison (DTAP) Program, the first prosecution-run program in the country to divert prison-bound felony offenders into residential drug treatment. She is the author of the Brooklyn DTAP Annual Report. Ms. Swern also supervises the TADD (Treatment Alternatives for Dually Diagnosed) Program, an alternative to incarceration program which diverts mentally ill defendants into treatment. 

Ms. Swern serves on the Judiciary Committee of the Brooklyn Bar Association and the Prosecution Function Committee of the American Bar Association. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the National District Attorney’s Association. Ms. Swern was selected 1999 Humanitarian of the Year by the Education and Assistance Corporation and the 2000 Prosecutor of the Year by the Kings County Criminal Bar Association. She also received the 2006 Thomas E. Dewey Medal from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The award recognizes the contributions that prosecutors have made to public service.

She is also an adjunct associate professor at Brooklyn Law School and a recipient of its 2007 Alumni of the Year award.  Ms. Swern has guest lectured at several other universities as well. In addition, she has served as the keynote speaker at several national conferences dedicated to problem-solving justice. 

David Kelly is First Deputy Bureau Chief in charge of the
Mental Health Court. 

The news articles listed below, courtesy of the National District Attorney’s Association (ndaa.org), may be of interest to you or members of your community.

HOW ONE MAN'S INVENTION IS PART OF A GROWING WORLDWIDE SCAM THAT SNARES THE DESPERATELY ILL

In the late 1980s, an out-of-work math instructor in Colorado built an electronic device he claimed could diagnose and destroy disease — everything from allergies to cancer — by firing radio frequencies into the body.

But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices, ordered William Nelson to quit selling his machine and making false claims. Nelson refused, and he was indicted on felony fraud charges. He fled the country, never to return.

That should have been the unremarkable end of another peddler of medical miracles.

Today, Nelson, 56, orchestrates one of America's boldest health-care frauds from a century-old building in Budapest, Hungary. Protected by barred gates, surveillance cameras and guards, he rakes in tens of millions of dollars selling a machine used to exploit the vulnerable and desperately ill.

This device is called the EPFX. In the U.S. alone, Nelson has sold more than 10,000 of them. More have been sold in the Northwest than in any other region, company officials said.

HATE CRIME REPORTING UNEVEN

The FBI released its yearly hate crime statistics yesterday, showing that more than 9,000 offenses were committed because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or physical or mental disability last year, an 8 percent increase over the year before.

But the report came under criticism because of wide discrepancies in the numbers reported by the states.

California reported the most hate crimes -- 1,604. New Jersey and Michigan reported 1,541 hate crimes combined. Virginia reported 389 hate crimes, a high among Southern states, and Maryland reported 218. One city reported more hate crimes than at least 10 states: Washington, with 64.

Northern states reported hundreds more hate crimes than Southern states, despite the South's troubled racial history and the fact that most of the victims of hate crimes were black. Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina reported fewer than 230 hate crimes combined. Louisiana, where civil rights protesters marched in Jena, a rural town where nooses were hung on a tree last year, reported 27 -- seven more than Rhode Island. Alabama reported one hate crime; Mississippi zero.

Heidi Beirich, director of research and special projects for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which studies hate groups, said many states are dismissive of hate crimes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/19/AR2007111901653_pf.html