Dr. Ursula Castellano, Associate Professor of Sociology, presents a paper on “My Function is to Change Behavior: An Ethnographic Examination of Mental Health Court Judges” at the European Consortium for Political Research on Sept. 5 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Abstract: Mental health courts (MHCs) represent a radical departure from the traditional way of adjudicating criminal cases for chronic offenders with psychiatric disabilities by offering treatment in lieu of prosecution. Research on MHCs is dominated by evaluation studies, but there are major gaps in our understanding of how judges depart from the edicts of common law to practice their new profession of changing offenders’ lives. The paper reports on findings from an ethnographic study of four American mental health courts (MHCs) and focuses on judicial strategies for facilitating participants’ program compliance during weekly status hearings. Under the banner of therapeutic jurisprudence, I investigate how MHC judges bring together the practices and symbols of the criminal justice and mental health care systems to motivate, reprimand and question wayward participants. I found that judges’ ability to make strategic use of these resources is intimately connected to a unique set of restraints imposed by the micro political theater of the alternative courtroom. I conclude that the rapid and widespread adoption of these alternative courts has brought about a fundamental shift in the role and scope of judicial power.
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