The Role of Mandated Mental Health Treatment in the Criminal Justice System

TL;DR

This study shows that mandated mental health treatment for probationers significantly reduces recidivism rates, with benefits outweighing costs, highlighting its importance in criminal justice reform.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that mandated mental health treatment decreases recidivism and operates independently from drug interventions, with long-term benefits especially for financially-advantaged offenders.

Findings

Mandated mental health treatment reduces three-year recidivism by 36%.

The effect persists over time and across different individual types.

Benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds 5:1, indicating high economic efficiency.

Abstract

Mental health disorders are particularly prevalent among those in the criminal justice system and may be a contributing factor in recidivism. Using North Carolina court cases from 1994 to 2009, this paper evaluates how mandated mental health treatment as a term of probation impacts the likelihood that individuals return to the criminal justice system. I use random variation in judge assignment to compare those who were required to seek weekly mental health counseling to those who were not. The main findings are that being assigned to seek mental health treatment decreases the likelihood of three-year recidivism by about 12 percentage points, or 36 percent. This effect persists over time, and is similar among various types of individuals on probation. In addition, I show that mental health treatment operates distinctly from drug addiction interventions in a multiple-treatment framework. I provide evidence that mental health treatment's longer-term effectiveness is strongest among more financially-advantaged probationers, consistent with this setting, in which the cost of mandated treatment is shouldered by offenders. Finally, conservative calculations result in a 5:1 benefit-to-cost ratio which suggests that the treatment-induced decrease in future crime would be more than sufficient to offset the costs of treatment.