NYAPRS Note: Yesterday marked the 30th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Enacted on July 26, 1990, the ADA is landmark civil rights legislation that, as the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law emphasized below, has made it possible for many Americans with disabilities to have opportunities to live in their own homes and communities of choice, to work in real jobs with real wages, to go to school alongside their peers, to access the built environment, to be parents, neighbors, and leaders, to make their own choices, and to be treated with dignity and respect. Almost 10 years late, the United States Supreme Court held in Olmstead v. L.C. that unjustified segregation of persons with disabilities constitutes discrimination in violation of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that established a mandate to public entities to ensure that people with disabilities live in the least restrictive, most integrated settings possible.
Last year, the Technical Assistance Collaborative convened a group to look at the connection between Olmstead and the disproportionate number of people with mental illnesses who are incarcerated in jails and prisons, segregated from society for offenses that could well have been prevented had they had access to appropriate community-based services and supports. The result was a brief entitled “Olmstead at 20: Using the Vision of to Decriminalize Mental Illness” (http://www.tacinc.org/media/90807/olmstead-at-twenty_09-04-2018.pdf) that found that “this problem deserves but has not yet received the attention or resources that Olmstead enforcement has brought to other forms of institutionalization”, leaving far too many people with mental illnesses to spend more time incarcerated and too often in solitary confinement settings than inmates who do not have mental illness and are released early on probation
The brief found that “most states recognize the need to maintain comprehensive and effectively working Olmstead plans, and some state plans establish diversion from the criminal justice system as a goal. Many states, however, do not.” The brief concluded that, “in this 20th anniversary year of Olmstead, the criminalization of people with mental illness in communities throughout the nation is a form of discrimination that must be addressed by public entities”
It is our hope that the Cuomo Administration and New York’s Olmstead body, the Most Integrated Setting Coordinating Council, will take this issue head on in the coming months.
