Treatment Advocacy Center models how small policy changes could shorten waits for forensic beds
The advocacy group's report focuses on the pretrial pipeline: state hospitals keep waitlists of defendants found incompetent because they lack enough forensic beds, with waits that typically run about a month but can stretch to a year. The authors estimate that roughly 90,000 jail inmates in 2016 fit this description.
To test whether the backlog is fixed or adjustable, the report builds a capacity model using data from Florida, Maine, New Jersey, Texas, and Wisconsin. It concludes that relatively small shifts in common practice could dramatically reduce bed waits. In its examples, Florida could cut its average forensic bed wait by about 75 percent (from 12 days to three) by diverting two people a month, while in Texas trimming the average hospital stay from 189 to 186 days would shrink waits from about two months to three days.
The report is advocacy-organization modeling rather than peer-reviewed research, and its figures rest on the group's own assumptions.
Source: Emptying the 'New Asylums': A Beds Capacity Model to Reduce Mental Illness Behind Bars — Treatment Advocacy Center
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