Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Summer 2023

Abstract

The Knox County Juvenile Mental Health Court is a specialized docket founded due to a shifting tide in the court system toward the theory of Therapeutic Jurisprudence. Major deinstitutionalization efforts in the 1980s “placed courts in the frontline of responses to substance abuse, family breakdown, and mental illness” as there were very few public resources available to handle these issues (Rottman and Casey 13). The traditional form of a punishment oriented system resulted in exorbitant numbers of incarcerations and high levels of recidivism, prompting a push towards a new approach. Therapeutic jurisprudence arose as “an approach to the law that uses the tools of the behavioral sciences to assess the law's therapeutic effects and, when consistent with other important legal values, to reshape law and legal processes in ways that can improve the psychological functioning and emotional wellbeing of the individuals” (Wexler and Winick 4). The guiding principle is that the court has a responsibility to help rather than solely punish by providing resources and alternatives to detention that will empower its participants to break cycles of recidivism. In the case of the Juvenile Mental Health Court, the treatment team is responsible for making decisions and interacting with the court participants. In Knox County court, the team is made up of the magistrate, the probation officer, psychologist, and social worker. The treatment team determines how the court proceeds and directly interacts with the children every week. Therefore, the importance of individual relationships and dynamics of the treatment team to the functioning of the court cannot be overstated as not many objective rules govern the therapeutic specialized dockets. However, this research also dives into the actual ‘therapeutic’ understanding that those in the court actually have. The court is tasked with determining the correct course of action based on the behavior of court participants, however, their level of expertise in the area is limited. While this does not completely inhibit the court’s ability to help its participants, the challenges it poses are examined in this research. The focus of this study was to understand the inner workings of court and each member of the treatment team as it became clear that these relationships were central to the functioning of the court.

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