Mental Health Court: A Judicial Perspective From the Last Frontier

Although judges with interests in improving the criminal justice response to individuals with serious mental illness have long been principal leaders in the development and innovation of mental health courts (MHCs), little is known about the experiences of pioneering MHC judges. Through an edited written narrative, this article provides a history of one “first-generation ” MHC through the lens of its founding judge. This chronicle of the Anchorage Mental Health Court’s 15-year history details its inception and evolving challenges, triumphs, sustainability, and philosophy. The history of the Anchorage Mental Health Court, in the context of evolving national changes in MHC practices, is presented to inform both current and developing MHCs. Keywords mental health court, mental health court judge, problem-solving courts Pioneering a new kind of therapeutic justice, the first mental health courts (MHCs) emerged in the late1990s as a problem-solving specialty criminal docket, intended to offer a treatment diversion response to the disproportionately large numbers of per-sons with mental health disorders recycling through the criminal justice system. According to Steadman and Redlich (2005), early MHCs were created to address a growing frustration with increasing criminal dockets slowed by “processing mor