Marshall Project and Frontline show Pennsylvania's competency wait as a window on a national problem
The reporters follow a woman with schizophrenia, arrested in Bucks County on a theft allegation, who sat in jail for months before a bed opened at Norristown State Hospital. Pennsylvania's average wait for restoration admission peaked at roughly eight months in January 2017, and by April 2019 it stood near 24 days after the state put more than $63 million and 175 beds into the system following ACLU litigation.
The piece places that story in a national context, noting wait-time legal battles in Oregon, Colorado, Alabama, Louisiana, Nevada, Utah, and Washington, and pointing to outpatient and jail-based approaches in Florida and California. The ACLU's position, as reported, is that waits beyond about a week violate defendants' rights.
The article ran in a version co-published by PBS Frontline and frames the competency backlog as a constitutional problem that many states have faced.
Source: Mentally Ill and Languishing in Jail — The Marshall Project (with PBS Frontline), by Christie Thompson, Leila Miller, and Manuel Villa
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