Commentary: civil commitment and its reform.

Commentary: civil commitment statutes--40 years of circumvention.

There is a longstanding body of literature that describes how states' civil commitment statutes have been stretched or circumvented to accommodate institutional and systemic needs. The paper by Levitt and colleagues provides yet another example of this phenomenon: Arizona's use of its civil commitment statutes to detain unrestorable, incompetent criminal defendants for whom other provisions hav...

Civil commitment is disappearing in Oregon.

Over the past 20 years, in Oregon, the number of individuals entered into the civil commitment process has risen, but the number of those actually committed has gone down dramatically. This commentary compares commitment data during a time when the state's population has increased substantially, while commitment rates have dropped by 50 percent. There are many possible factors that have contrib...

Thirty-five years of working with civil commitment statutes.

This commentary reflects my 35 years of working with civil commitment statutes, first in Alaska, then in Oregon, and on various committees on the national level. Coming from a background in community and public psychiatry, I have always considered civil commitment to be the most important forensic mental health statute, as the commitment process in any state greatly influences the lives of many...

A Commentary: Why Civil Commitment Laws Don't Work the Way They're Supposed To

CRIPA, Olmstead, and the transformation of the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board.

This commentary explores the relationship among the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court Olmstead decision; the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, in its application of CRIPA (the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Patients Act); and the application of both CRIPA and Olmstead to the question of individuals hospitalized in state mental institutions following commitment from criminal courts. Using O...