Acting when nobody else will ...

What choices do they have?

• A Florida jail has installed 4 padded cells with cameras (at the cost of $131,00) in the wake of the deaths of two inmates with mentall illnesses.
• A Virginia Supreme Court justice has launched a mental heath commission – as one legislator notes: "They [the judiciary] have been put in the situation where at every level and at every court, the people with mental illness are confronting the judges. And they don't have the tools for confronting these people. I think [the judges] are acting responsibly and reacting to our actions and lack of actions."

Corrections officers, judges, law enforcement officers … all of them are filling the gap left by the mental health community. People are left untreated, land in the criminal justice system and … surprise … we expect the criminal justice system to make everything OK.

We’ve said it before … where are the grand juries to investigate the mental health system?

The criminal justice system has no other choice but to build in safety nets for the many people who have fallen through the cracks.

But instead of fixing the cracks, the mental health community seems intent on criticizing the quality of the nets.