A Court of Refuge

January 8, 2018
Lerner-Wren, who presided over the nation’s first mental-health court in Broward County, Fla., recounts the need for and accomplishments of that court in this revealing but muddled work of legal advocacy. Founded in 1997, Broward County’s mental-health court, modeled after drug-treatment courts, aimed to divert the mentally ill from jails and prisons and toward social services and health-care treatment. Such an approach may decrease recidivism and afford a better quality of life to people with mental-health problems, but its main goal is to promote dignity and reject stigma, Lerner-Wren writes. To this point, she shuns statistics on the court’s effectiveness as a crime-reduction tool (“Data schmata,” she recalls saying when the usefulness of such courts was challenged at a policy conference), though she favors dense, repetitive statistics on mentally ill, homeless, and incarcerated populations. Sections covering deinstitutionalization, criminalization, therapeutic jurisprudence, and family caretakers, illustrated using court cases, reveal the most about the court’s work. The writing, however, is hampered by stilted dialogue, repeated introductions to people and concepts, and general disorganization, while details of the court’s day-to-day processes remain sparse. As a result, this well-intentioned book’s appeal to both specialists and lay readers will be limited.

June 1, 2018

Mental health courts admonish that the traditional criminal justice model is incapable of handling its large population of mentally ill offenders. In response, Lerner-Wren (psychology, Nova Southeastern Univ.) pioneered the first court to specialize in such cases in 1997 in Broward County, FL. This book records her judicial and professional advisory experiences. The court's philosophy of "therapeutic jurisprudence" is explored along with the county's unique characteristics. Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1960s, political criminalization, and increased homelessness are blamed for overreliance on the justice system. Case studies of Broward County offenders illustrate the tone and operation of the court including its relative informality, staffing, treatment options for special needs cases, trauma issues, and family input into the process. Positive outcomes with misdemeanor offenders are stressed although statistical evaluation of the long-term effectiveness of such courts is deemphasized. VERDICT Written by a committed legal advocate, this book is valuable for its cogent insights into the development and spread of mental health courts as well as its critical perspective on the Florida mental health care system.--Antoinette Brinkman, formerly with Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.