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Mental Health and the Law - Untreated Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System

To be clear: untreated severe mental illness places a great burden on our legal system. The Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1998, dedicated to eliminating barriers to the timely and effective treatment of severe mental illness captures the issue succinctly: “Fifty years of failed mental health policy have placed law enforcement on the front lines of mental illness crisis response and turned jails and prisons into the new asylums.”