Alliance Alert: The Alliance for Rights and Recovery strongly agrees with Sakeena Trice’s thoughtful analysis and her call for New York to follow the evidence presented in the state’s independent evaluation of Kendra’s Law. As the evaluation makes clear, people receiving voluntary, intensive community-based services achieved outcomes that matched or exceeded those receiving court-ordered treatment in most areas, demonstrating that it is access to housing, treatment, case management, and other supports, not coercion, that drives recovery. The report also documents serious concerns about due process, ineffective legal representation, racial disparities, and the lasting harms many individuals experience while under court order, reinforcing the urgent need for reform.
Rather than making Kendra’s Law permanent, New York should implement the researchers’ recommendations by strengthening due process protections, expanding voluntary services and Enhanced Voluntary Agreements (EVAs), ensuring individuals choosing voluntary agreements receive the same priority for housing and intensive community supports as those under court order, and investing in counties that still lack adequate voluntary service infrastructure. The state must also take direct action to reduce the racial disparities documented in the evaluation through stronger accountability, equity monitoring, and less reliance on coercive interventions. This is an opportunity to build a system that responds with timely, recovery-oriented supports instead of waiting until people are in crisis or involved with the courts.
These critical conversations will continue at the Alliance for Rights and Recovery’s 44th Annual Conference, where we will host a major panel on Kendra’s Law and the statewide evaluation featuring Sakeena Trice, members of the research team who conducted the evaluation, advocates, and other leaders from across New York. Together, they will discuss what the findings mean for the future of New York’s mental health system and the policy changes needed to create a stronger, more equitable, and recovery-oriented system of support.
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Kendra’s Law is Broken Says N.Y. Review
By Sakeena Trice | New York Daily News Opinion | August 19, 2026
New York now has even clearer evidence that investments in voluntary mental health services— not Kendra’s Law court orders — must be the first response to serious mental illness. When lawmakers reauthorized Kendra’s Law in 2022, they required an independent evaluation. The state Office of Mental Health hired researchers at University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work and Human Services Research Institute. Their 400-page report is now public, and the findings are undeniable.
Researchers compared people forced into treatment under Kendra’s Law with individuals who voluntarily received services. For most indicators, voluntary care matched or outperformed court-ordered treatment — faring just as well on daily living functions and employment, and significantly better on arrests.
Where court-ordered treatment appeared to outperform voluntary care — housing stability, hospitalization, and risk of harm — the interviews explain why. People credited the case management, housing help, and transportation bundled with the order, not the order itself. Nearly half said they would have engaged just as readily without a judge, had services simply been offered.
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest has made this case for more than 20 years, and the state’s evaluation underscores it more forcefully than ever. NYLPI’s 2025 report documented that involuntary treatment is no more effective than voluntary care and that Kendra’s Law is not implemented evenly. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are subjected to the law at far higher rates than white New Yorkers.
The state’s evaluators confirmed that finding: when Black and white New Yorkers have the same number of red flags, Black New Yorkers are 26% more likely to be forcibly removed to a hospital under Kendra’s Law.
That disparity reflects whom the system was built to target — whose neighborhoods get referrals, whose noncompliance gets flagged as dangerous rather than overlooked, and whose poverty or hospitalization is interpreted as risk, not need.
The evaluation included in-depth interviews describing the experiences of 46 people who received Kendra’s Law orders. The findings read like a warning. Nearly everyone described fear of hospitalization, jail, or other removal as the reason they complied.
Many said the “choice” offered at hospital discharge was no choice at all. Others described monitoring as its own source of harm: loss of privacy, restricted movement, barriers to employment, and surveillance that compounded the racialized scrutiny they already faced from police and neighbors. Nearly all raised medication side effects and loss of bodily autonomy. About half described being stigmatized.
Put simply by one interviewee: being subject to a Kendra’s Law order meant being “treated as a lower-class citizen.” In every interview, responders described legal coercion that followed them well beyond the clinical relationship — from confusion about how an order ends to collateral harm to employment, housing, custody proceedings, and immigration status.
These findings are impossible to square with the state’s description of Kendra’s Law as a narrow, last-resort tool for a small number of people who pose a risk. The evaluation shows a system that does not outperform voluntary care, falls disproportionately on Black New Yorkers, and inflicts real, documented harm.
Lawmakers should not extend Kendra’s Law and certainly should not expand it. New York must reckon with what its own researchers have found: it’s not the coercion that works; it’s the services.
Kendra Webdale’s tragic death demanded a serious response, and nearly 25 years later, New York finally has the evidence to build one: voluntary, fully funded, and available long before a court order is ever even contemplated.
Trice is a senior staff attorney with NYLPI’s Disability Justice Program.