Study finds rising numbers of incompetent defendants being routed into long-term hospital care
A national survey study published in CNS Spectrums found that rising numbers of people found incompetent to stand trial are increasingly being routed into long-term state hospital care, a trend the authors frame as a de facto "reinstitutionalization" of people with serious mental illness, driven by deinstitutionalization-era bed closures colliding with growing competency-system demand.
The paper connects two threads that run throughout this backfill — shrinking civil psychiatric bed capacity and a rising number of competency referrals — into a single explanatory account of why waitlists have grown nearly everywhere over the past decade.
Source: A survey of national trends in psychiatric patients found incompetent to stand trial: reasons for the reinstitutionalization of people with serious mental illness in the United States — CNS Spectrums (Cambridge University Press), by Katherine Warburton, Barbara E. McDermott, Anthony Gale, and Stephen M. Stahl
← Back to the map