cover image A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court Judge

A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court Judge

Ginger Lerner-Wren, with Rebecca A. Eckland. Beacon, $26.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8070-8698-8

Lerner-Wren, who presided over the nation’s first mental-health court in Broward County, Fla., recounts the need for and accomplishments of that court in this revealing but muddled work of legal advocacy. Founded in 1997, Broward County’s mental-health court, modeled after drug-treatment courts, aimed to divert the mentally ill from jails and prisons and toward social services and health-care treatment. Such an approach may decrease recidivism and afford a better quality of life to people with mental-health problems, but its main goal is to promote dignity and reject stigma, Lerner-Wren writes. To this point, she shuns statistics on the court’s effectiveness as a crime-reduction tool (“Data schmata,” she recalls saying when the usefulness of such courts was challenged at a policy conference), though she favors dense, repetitive statistics on mentally ill, homeless, and incarcerated populations. Sections covering deinstitutionalization, criminalization, therapeutic jurisprudence, and family caretakers, illustrated using court cases, reveal the most about the court’s work. The writing, however, is hampered by stilted dialogue, repeated introductions to people and concepts, and general disorganization, while details of the court’s day-to-day processes remain sparse. As a result, this well-intentioned book’s appeal to both specialists and lay readers will be limited. (Mar.)