Miami-Dade County Judge Steve Leifman has just stepped down from the bench after 30 years, effective December 31st. He’s internationally known for developing major reforms of how the criminal justice system deals with people who have mental illnesses; he’s even been honored by Pope Francis. Margie Menzel reports.
Leifman says his career has coincided exactly with the de-institutionalization of people with mental illnesses, 48 years ago. At that time, most people with mental illnesses were in institutional care, such as in a psychiatric hospital. Leifman was a 17-year-old legislative intern, sent to look into a constituent’s complaint about the way her son was being treated in institutional care.
“And I find Jonathan and he is in a bed with all four-point restraints. And he’s probably 100, 150 pounds overweight from the Thorazine that they are injecting him with. And he’s screaming and crying and carrying on and moaning. Out of a horror movie. And it was way before HIPPA, so I asked to see his files, like I knew what I was looking at or for. So I’m going through this stuff and trying to figure out what the hell it meant. I had no idea, except something caught my eye. And I talked to the staff, and I said, ‘Excuse me, what’s this? It says that he’s autistic.’ He wasn’t even psychotic -- he was autistic!” :
Jonathan ended up getting proper treatment, says Leifman, but when the institutional care facilities began releasing people to the community for services, the criminal justice system wasn’t ready for it.
“Everyone realized we had a problem. Everyone realized it was wrong. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t D or R, it wasn’t law enforcement versus PD [public defender] -- it was great. What we recognized was that we were all so busy doing our job -- judges judging, prosecutors prosecuting, defenders defending, police policing -- nobody was responsible for the system that was allowing these poor people to cycle in and out of every acute care system in our community at great expense and at great harm to these poor individuals.”
The Miami-Dade Criminal Mental Health Project found that on average, people with mental illnesses remain incarcerated four to eight times longer than people without mental illnesses arrested for the exact same charge, at a cost seven times higher.
In 2000, Leifman helped develop a training program that teaches law enforcement officers to recognize the signs and symptoms of mental illnesses. That’s the pre-arrest piece of the Criminal Mental Health Project.
“We set up a treatment program for our police here because for all the obvious reasons, they do not want to go to get treatment at their departments. You know, the stigma, losing their jobs [or] promotion -- all of that good stuff. You know, last year more police died from suicide than in the line of duty. It’s terrible. And so, the woman that runs my CIT program -- that’s our Police Crisis Intervention Team Police Program -- she gets 150 to 250 calls a month from police officers for their own personal mental health issues.
“And so we set up a treatment program where we’ll get them treated outside their department with the permission of all the police chiefs. And we don’t have to report it unless they’re suicidal or homicidal. And so they love it, and it has played a significant role. You can draw a straight line down from the five years before we started CIT to now where the police shootings have almost stopped. It’s really remarkable. And that was something we had not even anticipated. It was just a wonderful ancillary benefit of doing the right thing for the right reason. And then, it turns out, it saved the city of Miami hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The post-arrest piece of the project diverts people with mental illnesses to treatment centers, rather than locking them up.
“So if you get arrested now, we have a whole new screening system. If you meet criteria for our program and you’re willing to take treatment, we get you out of jail and we get you into a full treatment system. And if you meet criteria for the Baker Act on a misdemeanor, we usually get you out within a few days of your arrest. We try not to order as many psychological evaluations because they’re a waste of time, but instead try to get you treated. And if you successfully complete our program, which most do, we drop the charges anyway and you don’t have a record.”
With this in place, Leifman says, recidivism for Miami-Dade’s misdemeanor population went from 75 percent to 20 percent. And recidivism among its felony population went from 75 percent to 6 percent.
And now, with the administrative responsibilities of a judge behind him, Leifman is free to devote himself to taking his reforms to other states and other nations.
