Idaho’s steady dismantling of the systems that prevent people with mental illness from cycling from crisis to crisis and then often into prison is the predictable outcome of policy choices that are pushing Idaho to the brink of catastrophe. Now comes the news that Idaho’s Mental Health Court programs are at risk.
One of Idaho’s most effective tools for interrupting the cycle of incarcerating those with mental illness is the mental health court. These courts divert people with serious mental illness into treatment, with supervision and accountability that address the root cause of their behavior. Mental health courts reduce recidivism, lower taxpayer costs and improve long-term outcomes for participants.
Far from facing cuts, it’s a program that should be expanded to accommodate a likely increase in participation in the coming years as Idahoans continue to experience the effects of our citizen legislature’s relentless tax cuts. The reductions in state revenue and cuts to critical services and programs are placing Idaho families in a place where safety and recovery are ever more distant realities and locking people up is the only remaining option.
Recent cuts to Medicaid in December (specifically, peer support specialists and ACT teams that support people with serious mental illness) to address Idaho’s budget shortfall have already cost lives. Our legislature is considering even more that will further reduce access to community-based mental health services, close hospitals and grow waitlists. People will be unable to access treatment or be forced to delay it until it’s an emergency. When that happens, law enforcement becomes the default response, with incarceration the ultimate solution: the most expensive and least effective option to address mental illness.
Our prisons are already under significant strain. Recent reports show they are over capacity and struggling with increasing costs. Incarceration far exceeds the cost of treatment and diversion even in the best of times. People with mental illness are far overrepresented in prison as compared to the general population, being more likely to be incarcerated in the first place. Jails and prisons are not designed to deliver mental healthcare. Using them as such strains corrections staff, overwhelms facilities and does nothing to promote public safety in the long run.
Under this framework, cutting support for mental health courts will actively fill the pipeline for a carceral system already under intense strain. The Legislature cannot claim to be concerned about prison overcrowding while cutting off the front-end systems that keep people out of it in the first place.
The choice before lawmakers is straightforward. Idaho can invest in early intervention, treatment access, and diversion programs that work, or it can continue down an unsustainable and fiscally reckless path where untreated mental illness funnels people into jails, drives up corrections costs, and leaves families and communities to bear the consequences. The latter is an option that shifts costs rather than saving money: from health systems to law enforcement, from prevention to incarceration and from short-term budgets to long-term damage.
Idaho can do better only if lawmakers are willing to acknowledge that mental healthcare is not optional infrastructure, but essential to public health, community safety, a functional justice system and a responsible state budget.
Beth Markley, CFRE, is the executive director of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Idaho, and Donna Brundage is the board president of NAMI Idaho.