Criminal defendants in Illinois who are mentally ill have often languished behind bars not because they’ve been found guilty of a crime but because they’re waiting to be placed in a state mental hospital.
After years of complaints, Illinois lawmakers have taken a step to address that problem with a bill that cleared the General Assembly on Friday with a House vote of 103-13 and now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker.
It could mean big changes for low-level offenders who are arrested for petty crimes and end up waiting months in county jails to get treatment in state mental hospitals because they’ve been deemed unfit to stand trial.
The impact of this problem was one of the subjects of “Failure to treat, failure to protect,” a Chicago Sun-Times Watchdogs series of reports in April.
“These defendants impose a substantial financial burden on county jails, the criminal court system and state-operated mental health facilities where they are frequently committed,” the legislation says.
Under the measure, court systems would be allowed to move people deemed unfit for trial out of jail and into outpatient treatment. The charges they face would be dropped. That could free space in overcrowded state mental hospitals, like the one in Elgin, for people charged with more serious offenses.
“Why is there the bottleneck?” said Susan Doig, chief executive officer of Trilogy, a Chicago mental health nonprofit. “There just aren’t enough beds. The state hasn’t created enough beds to meet the need.”
Yet Doig also says “it’s trickier” to treat those people on the outside.
The legislation would put a time limit on how long people facing a misdemeanor charge could be held in a hospital. Because they wouldn’t have spent more than a year in jail for a misdemeanor, they wouldn’t spend more than a year in treatment.
With credit for good behavior, that could be as little as six months or less.
The bill also would create a task force to examine how the state determines who’s mentally fit to stand trial. That panel — including representatives of the courts, sheriffs, public defenders, prosecutors, mental health agencies, the General Assembly and others — would have until Nov. 1, 2026, to deliver a plan for fixing the system.
“The task force can look at how do we get people healthy and fit,” said Doig, who said she’s concerned that mentally ill low-level offenders deteriorate in jail, and then, when they’re let out, it’s often with no connection to psychiatric services.
The bill also calls for new certification standards to try to boost the number of mental health experts to evaluate defendants by pre-qualifying them.
READ THE SUN-TIMES SERIES
Click here to see and read “Failure to treat, failure to protect,” The Watchdogs investigative series by reporters Stephanie Zimmermann and Frank Main.