Abstract
Today, America faces a health paradox: the nation’s largest jails are the nation’s largest psychiatric institutions. In a criminal justice system designed for punishment, solutions like mental health units or mental health courts try to address this contradiction. Yet, if mental illness is a health issue, and not a criminal issue, then increased investments in the criminal justice system seem misplaced. Instead, a more promising approach is to stop the mentally ill from entering the criminal justice system at all.
This article presents just that: a new approach to decriminalize mental illness. Viewed under an overarching “health justice” lens, the approach shows how deficiencies in systemic components outside an individual’s control—called social determinants of health—lead to negative mental health outcomes. The approach encourages a more balanced and nuanced understanding of why the mentally ill end up incarcerated, thereby shifting any disproportionate moral blame on the individual to a broader responsibility found in inequitable systems.
Then, using two unique forms of thinking—systems thinking and upstream thinking—the approach breaks down the systemic components contributing to criminalization of mental illness, which lead to such inequitable results. Under these thinking frameworks, the approach shows how the criminal justice system is an inadequate system for the mentally ill. Finally, the new approach proposes focusing on six leverage points of investment before an individual even enters the criminal justice system, which, working all together, address the systemic deficiencies by intertwining the social determinants of health. In this way, the paradox is alleviated, the mentally ill do not end up in the criminal justice system, and health justice is achieved
Recommended Citation
Paige E. Kohn,
Ending the Cycle: A New Approach to Decriminalize Mental Illness,
50
S. Ill. U. L.J.
1
(2025).
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/siulj/vol50/iss1/5