The recent announcement by the de Blasio administration about a task force on behavioral health and the criminal justice system may appear to be an innocuous endeavor to evaluate the mental health needs of arrestees.
But Mayor Bill de Blasio’s comment that “for far too long, our city’s jails have acted as de facto mental health facilities” betrays his liberal agenda, which blames the social environment for individual sociopathic crimes and supports “get out of jail free” cards for mental illness.
These premises of criminal justice reform are deja vu of former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s model of social learning determinism and organic brain disorders as excuses for the voluntary criminal acts of individuals — replace prisons with mental hospitals — or the Angela Davis political prisoner models.
Being a person with some form of mental disorder does not necessarily diminish or abolish moral culpability for crimes committed and the required sentencing for retributive justice by the state, unless the person has been determined to be criminally insane and thus unable to “appreciate the nature or quality or the wrongfulness of his acts,” as in former City Councilman Dan Halloran’s plea due to a benign brain tumor.
Secondly, de Blasio asserts that “everyone deserves access to quality health care,” which, although perhaps a civil right, is not necessarily incumbent upon the government to provide through socialist measures such as Medicaid.
If most individuals, especially now under the individual mandate of Obamacare, have health care insurance and refuse to seek behavioral or mental health evaluation or treatment and then commit heinous crimes, why should the criminal justice system divert arrestees into some government-paid program in lieu of fines and imprisonment?
Most mentally ill people do not commit crimes — only some. Not all, arrestees are mentally ill, and the mental illnesses do not necessarily absolve them of culpability for their crimes.
Some arrestees have behavioral health issues which should be treated concomitantly with their incarceration, not as “get out of jail free” cards. De Blasio and Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services Lilliam Barrios-Paoli — true to the underlying social environment hypotheses of the 1960s “war on poverty” — are just rehashing the same old-school, liberal public policy line.
And the bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, concurs in Cassius’ words that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” (“Julius Ceasar,” Act I, Scene 2).
Joseph Manago
Briarwood
