The proposed study would describe and produce a taxonomy of the fifty States' systems--that is, their administrative, legal, and agency structures--for providing criminal courts with mental health evaluations of mentally ill defendants prior to trial (e.g., competence to stand trial evaluations). Preliminary evidence suggests that the States have developed a variety of service delivery structures, both inpatient and outpatient, for delivering pretrial evaluation services; but currently there are no empirical descriptions, no models, and no evaluation data for these systems on a nationwide level. These """"""""pretrial evaluation systems"""""""" are important to a understand because pretrial evaluations have become a critical point of contact between the chronic mentally ill and the criminal justice system, thus having significant implications for identification of the mentally ill defendant who is in need of mental health services. In addition, the quality of pretrial evaluations has implications for the quality of justice in criminal cases, and the cost of pretrial evaluation systems is of concern in order to make best use of funds allocated to mental health in criminal justice activities. The study would employ a standardized telephone survey procedure to achieve a description of these systems, focusing especially on their administrative structures, legal regulations, and types of agencies. Respondents would be relevant administrators, directors, reimbursement offices, legal counsel, and service providers. Survey content will be structures to provide information about a State's system related to several conceptual dimensions (e.g., restrictiveness; due process) that may have special value for future evaluative studies. In a second part of the study, quantitative forms of the descriptive information will be used to develop a taxonomy of the systems, thus producing a set of models for existing pretrial evaluation systems. The above work is aimed at enabling future researchers to proceed toward systematic studies evaluating the relative quality, cost, and effectiveness of these various models for delivering pretrial evaluation services.
| Grisso, T; Cocozza, J J; Steadman, H J et al. (1996) A national survey of hospital -and community-based approaches to pretrial mental health evaluations. Psychiatr Serv 47:642-4 |
