Mental Illness and the Courts

This last Friday, I began my day by going to court. It was, finally, time for the hearing for the young man who...impelled by voices...barricaded the entrance to my church. Though the church itself did not press charges, the state did. Law enforcement tends not to smile upon people who refuse to respond to a direct request.

We'd been praying for him in worship, but prayer needs to stir action, and so I'd doing more than that. I'd visited with his family, and visited with him in the state psychiatric institution where he was involuntarily admitted.

So it felt rather peculiar to be subpoenaed by the prosecution as a witness against him. That felt particularly odd as I sat in the courtroom with his family.

The courtroom experience was interesting. There seemed to be two clear types of case before the court that morning.

Most of the folks there were there on minor charges, like possession of drug paraphernalia or DUIs. They came in under their own power. Most had either lawyers or public defenders. Things for them went rather quickly, usually with a guilty plea followed by a commitment to do a treatment program.

Then there were other folks, whose charges were equally minor...typically trespassing. But they didn't enter the court on their own.

They were brought in handcuffed and in shackles, with officers flanking them. These folks appeared to have one primary thing in common. No, they weren't supervillains. They weren't unusually violent, or charged with heinous crimes.

Instead, every one of the shackled souls were rather obviously mentally ill. Several were homeless, or had been until they'd either disturbed the peace or been arrested for trespassing on private property. They were coming from custody at state run institutions. Some seemed to really struggle to understand what was happening to them. Others seemed clearly disoriented and/or agitated.

It was clear that for most of these individuals, cycling endlessly between incarceration and homelessness was the norm. It was the pattern of their lives. One fellow in particular had been through the court more than 25 times. If anything, the whole system seemed woefully dysfunctional, part of a feedback loop that crammed the docket of the court and left, really, no-one for the better.

Back in the middle part of the 20th century, folks like this were typically part of either state-run institutions or homes. But in the 1980s, as part of the "everything government does is wrong" movement, those institutions were defunded and shuttered. The idea was noble: let's put people out into their communities. Let's have localities care for them. Of course, localities didn't have the resources or the infrastructure to deal with the folks being dropped on their doorstep...so they didn't. Now, thirty years later, our mental health system is, for the indigent, desperately threadbare. Left to wander unsupervised and unmedicated, they are funnelled into our system of justice...and out...and in again. They do not compute.

The young man whose actions brought me into court that day seemed more lucid, and had served time, and was released into the custody of a confused but caring family. My hope and prayer is that he escapes the pointless, benighted cycle that our society inflicts on those afflicted with mental illness.

Trespasses

The morning started hectic. With the missus leaving for a week on a business trip, and the dog still recovering from a post-operative infection, and the kids needing to be shuttled off to be with their grandparents, and worship, and a session meeting, it was lining up to be a busy one.

I got to church with 50 minutes to get things prepped and copied and unlocked. Or, rather, I arrived at the entrance of the church in plenty of time. As I pulled up to the one entrance to our facility, there sat a battered SUV, parked perpendicular to the church entrance. Some bottles were set out on the ground in the drive, making for a makeshift barricade. I rolled to a stop, and walked over to the SUV, in which sat a young Korean man who'd visited our church on a variety of occasions before. He's a creative guy, but is living with mental illness that is likely exacerbated by substance abuse. Oh no, thought I. This is not good. We'd had a few long conversations before. I asked him what was going on.

He informed me that there would be no worship today, and that he was going to prevent anyone from entering "the building that is the gateway of Hell." I asked him to move. He refused, instead getting out and putting his body in the only place where a vehicle might possibly squeeze by. I asked again, calmly, letting him know that if he didn't, I would need to call the cops. Not budging.

So I put in the call, and spent the next five minutes or so trying to persuade him to move along peaceably. He wouldn't, instead going on long rants about being Legion and about how God had instructed him to insure that worship never happened again. Worship is evil, he insisted. It's monstrous, a sign of the end of things, and it was forbidden. He'd clearly had some sort of major event in the last week, and was more agitated than I'd ever seen him. Still, I hoped I could get him to move on before law enforcement arrived. No dice. He'd alternate between almost acquiescing, and then suddenly becoming angry, raising his voice, eager to bring about confrontation as evidence of his role in the great conflagration he was convinced was about to begin at my tiny little church.

When the cops showed, things gradually deteriorated. Law enforcement in Montgomery County is as professional as they come, and they calmly tried to talk him into leaving.

He was first incoherent, and then disrespectful. Neither are good things to be around cops, and when they began to press, he became agitated, challenging the officers to arrest him...or to shoot him. Fortunately, they only did the former.

I stuck around for a while, then scrambled into the church to get things going. I felt like crap. The arresting officer came in with my copy of a form, and we talked for a bit. "I know you try to have patience with people like that in your line of work," he said. "But we can't afford to have patience." "You're running a business here," he said. "You can't have someone disrupting your business, and making sure that doesn't happen is our job." I felt even more like crap.

It's hard for a pastor to charge someone with trespassing.