Victories as a Result of the CMHP

Published May 6, 2022

The Eleventh Judicial Circuit Criminal Mental Health Project, also known as the “CMHP” or the “Miami Model”, was originally established in 2000 to divert nonviolent misdemeanant defendants with serious mental illness (SMI) and those with substance use disorders from the legal system, and into community-based treatment and support services. The CMHP later grew in 2008 to include defendants who had been arrested for less serious and nonviolent felonies, as well as other charges that were deemed appropriate on an individual basis. Currently, eligible individuals must have pending misdemeanor charges, be booked into jail, and meet criteria for involuntary psychiatric examination based on Florida Statutes.

Statistics

The Miami-Dade County jail has about 2,400 individuals receiving psychotherapeutic medications, which is estimated to cost taxpayers about $232 million annually or an estimated $636,000 per day (opens a document). There are also additional costs to taxpayers resulting from crime and threats to public safety. The CMHP has helped reduce that number of individuals, saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and allowing people with mental illness to receive the medication and care that they need in a more appropriate setting.

Over the past decade, the CMHP has celebrated approximately 4,000 diversions of defendants with mental illnesses away from the criminal justice and legal system and towards community-based treatment and support. Recidivism rates (which is the tendency of a convicted criminal to re-offend) among participants in the misdemeanor jail diversion program have dropped 55%, having decreased from 75% to 20% annually.

Those participating in the felony jail diversion program have shown reductions in jail bookings and jail days of more than 75%. Since 2008, total jail bookings and days spent in the county jail among felony jail diversion program participants decreased by 59% and 57%, which led to a difference of about 31,000 fewer days in jail (the same as about 84 years of jail bed days).

Additionally, the pre-booking diversion program has demonstrated significant results. To date, the CMHP has provided Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training to more than "7,000 law enforcement officers from all 36 local municipalities in Miami-Dade County," including Miami-Dade Public Schools and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. CIT officers have been responding to an estimate of approximately 20,000 mental health crisis calls per year.

Since 2010, CIT officers from the Miami-Dade Police Department and City of Miami Police Department have responded to 91,472 mental health crisis calls resulting in 17,516 diversions from jail, 55,013 individuals assisted in accessing community-based treatment, and only 152 arrests. This is a win for both the Miami-Dade Police Department and persons with mental illness, as well as the community as a whole.

The Miami-Dade County jail has also seen the annual number of jail bookings decrease from around 118,000 to 53,000, and the average daily inmate population has plummeted from 7,200 to about 4,200. Miami-Dade County also closed a jail facility, which has saved taxpayers an estimated $12 million per year.

The CMHP is a forward-thinking problem to a community problem. The best part is that providing the mentally ill with an alternative to incarceration doesn’t require legislation.

“We didn’t decriminalize anything,” says Sally Heyman,  Miami-Dade County Commissioner. “We didn’t change any Florida statutes [...] We’re not changing the law. It’s still a crime to do certain things.”

 

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