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Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Outpatient centers better solution than jails for competency restoration

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Four new pilot programs providing outpatient competency restoration services have significantly reduced the number of mentally ill inmates languishing in county jails waiting for state hospital beds to open up, according to a handout from the Department of State Health Services (pdf) distributed last week to a conference sponsored by the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense.This is a great idea because there's no real public safety benefit and a lot of extra expense to insisting competency restoration services be delivered in a carceral setting. For some defendants, sure, but not indiscriminately for everyone. Here's how the DSHS flyer described the new pilots:The Outpatient Competency Restoration (OCR) pilots were launched by Department of State Health Services (DSHS) earlier this year in response to Senate Bill 867, 80th Legislature which amended Article 46B, Code of Criminal Procedure, in many respects to explicitly allow for outpatient competency restoration of defendants who have been determined by the court not to be a danger to others (see CCP, Art...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on November 01, 2008 (boomark / email).