By Dave Ranney, KHI News Service, January 27, 2012
TOPEKA — The House Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice is scheduled next week to take up a bill designed to encourage prosecutors to enter diversion agreements with mentally ill offenders.
"We need to be diverting low-level repeat offenders from our criminal justice system because they're taking up such a great amount of resources – the district attorney's time, the judges' time, the court's time and, of course, jail," said the committee's chairwoman, Rep. Pat Colloton, R-Leawood.
"The other thing is, really, these are people who get caught up in the system because they're mentally ill and they're off their meds," Colloton said. "We should be getting them into treatment, not putting them in jail."
The committee is expected to take testimony on House Bill 2498 at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday in Room 144-S at the Statehouse.
The bill would create a legal framework for giving prosecutors the option of entering diversion agreements with nonviolent offenders who have a serious mental illness.
Under the agreements, offenders would be required to comply with treatment regimens set by their community mental health centers for one to three years. They would be expected to pay restitution if they had damaged property.
The agreements would be limited to adults who have been charged with a crime that has not gone to trial.
If an offender did not comply with the proscribed treatment plan, prosecutors would have the option of either rewriting the diversion agreement or resuming criminal proceedings.
"This has worked very, very well in Johnson County," Colloton said.
In Kansas, the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office is the only prosecutor's office that uses diversion agreements. The agreements are brokered with the Johnson County Mental Health Center.
"We've had diversion agreements for about eight years now," said Susan Rome, clinical supervisor for community support services at the mental health center. "At least 90 percent are successfully completed. It's a really good way to get people into treatment who don't really have what you'd call a 'criminal nature.' It keeps them out of the criminal justice system and gets them services they need instead of entering the criminal justice system and getting worse and worse."
Rome said her office currently is overseeing nine diversion agreements.
Prosecutors in Johnson County, she said, do not consider diversion for anyone who is mentally ill and charged with assault or domestic violence.
Mental health advocates support the bill.
"It's meant to be an alternative to what goes on in the system now," said Rick Cagan, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill-Kansas. "It doesn't require anybody to do anything. It just says, 'If you're looking for a way to keep someone who's mentally ill out of jail and to get them into treatment, here’s how to do it.'"
House Bill 2498 was first introduced in 2011.
http://www.khi.org/news/2012/jan/27/committee-hear-mental-health-diversion-bill/
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