Giving Compass' Take:

• Research indicates that Kendra's Law - inspired by Andrew Goldstein's murder of Kendra Webdale - can prevent homelessness and violence among mentally ill individuals if adequate resources are available. 

• How can funders ensure that there are sufficient resources to provide support for dangerously mentally ill individuals? 

• Learn how a law enforcement and mental health partnership can pay off.

Studies by the Duke University School of Medicine indicate that patients like Andrew Goldstein, when following the provisions of Kendra’s Law, are far more likely to stay on their medication and far less likely to be homeless, hospitalized, arrested, or incarcerated. The law does not make up for the dire shortages of hospital beds and supervised housing, but Kendra’s Law has been a godsend for some of the most tormented among us.

Marvin Swartz, a Duke professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who has co-authored many of those studies, attributes the success to two things: First, the law not only requires compliance by the patient; it requires the government to do its part, arranging housing, supervision, and rehabilitation. So Kendra’s Law patients go to the head of the line. The law was not just a statement of good intentions. It came with $32 million a year for personnel and drugs to handle the AOT population and $125 million for enhanced community services. The second reason for its success, Swartz says, is that the involvement of a court seems to make everyone—patients, government, families—take the treatment more seriously.

All but three states—Connecticut, Maryland, and Massachusetts—offer AOT as an option for county mental-health authorities, but only New York mandates it as a statewide policy. Most other states have not invested in the therapeutic infrastructure or created the judicial oversight to make it most effective.

One outspoken supporter of AOT is Kendra’s mother, Patricia Webdale, who endorsed the original law and became an improbable champion of families like Goldstein’s, bonding with them over a shared experience of calamitous loss. In a 2005 Buffalo News op-ed, she pleaded with lawmakers to renew the law and suggested that if a Kendra’s Law had been in place in January 1999, her daughter would be alive.

Read the full article about Kendra's Law by John J. Lennon and Bill Keller at The Marshall Project.