Let me state up front that most people with mental illness are not inherently violent, and most violent criminals aren't inherently mentally ill. Still, there's a small percentage of individuals in our society whose mental illness leads them to lash out violently. If these folks are incompetent to stand trial, they should be institutionalized so they can receive treatment. If they are competent to stand trial, they should go to prison if convicted for their crimes.
In Illinois, though, Democrats have embraced a third option; one that's ineffective both in treating mental illness and providing consequences for violent actions. As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, Pritzker signed a law earlier this year that "gives court systems the ability to move people charged with petty crimes but who are unfit to stand trial out of county jails and into outpatient psychiatric treatment." In theory, that sounds fine. These aren't people charged with serious violent crimes, after all, and given the shortage of mental health beds for inpatient treatment helping these individuals receive outpatient care is better than nothing, right?
The problem, though, is that based on the Sun-Times reporting, it looks like Democratic lawmakers are trying to lump violent offenders in with those accused of "petty" crimes.
How to handle severely mentally ill people who are unfit to stand trial in a system lacking the state psychiatric hospital beds to restore them to health?
That’s the question a state-mandated task force of lawmakers, court officials and mental health professionals has been meeting about since October under a new law signed by Gov. JB Pritzker.
It’s also one of the systemic issues noted in a Chicago Sun-Times series, “Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect,” which examined the backgrounds of several people exhibiting serious mental illness who were arrested in high-profile attacks downtown in which victims were killed or badly injured.
The series found mentally ill people who are unhoused are far more likely to be victimized than to harm someone else, but there are some who spend decades cycling through jails, prisons and hospitals with their problems never fully addressed until they commit a serious offense.
Since the series was published in April, several more attacks have occurred in which the accused people had long histories of severe mental illness and arrests, including the case of Jada Beatty, a woman arrested Dec. 16 and charged in attacks on four people in the Loop.
... Beatty, the 26-year-old woman charged in the latest downtown attacks, had a public guardian appointed in 2023 at the request of her family because of her mental illness. A physician’s evaluation found she had “a severe form of schizoaffective disorder that makes her extremely psychotic, manic, unpredictable and violent.”
She was sentenced to two years in prison in May for hitting a woman in the face in 2024 at the Roosevelt Road Red Line subway stop, but was soon released because of the time she’d served in jail. She got in trouble again in November for allegedly threatening Chicago Transit Authority passengers.
Then on Dec. 16, she was arrested and charged with hitting a man and woman in their faces with a bottle on the Red Line subway at State and Lake streets before striking a man in the face with a bottle and slapping his wife at Macy’s just minutes later.
Beatty is hardly the type of "petty offender" who's supposed to benefit from the newly adopted law. If her mental illness is the root cause of her violent behavior, then she needs to be in a secure mental health facility. And if it's not the root cause, then she needs to be incarcerated for a significant period of time instead of being given a slap on the wrist for her violent crimes.
But according to the Sun-Times, individuals like Beatty are catching the eye of the task force.
To provide better treatment for such people, the task force is looking at approaches used elsewhere, including a program called Bridges of Colorado, which was created in 2019 to place liaisons in every judicial district in the state to address criminal defendants with significant mental health needs.
The Colorado program links courts and families with mental health providers to provide “wraparound … person-centered care” including medical, housing and transportation assistance. The program served nearly 4,600 people in 2025, according to its annual report, at a cost of $6.28 a day versus $1,013 or more per day for hospitalization or $66 a day for incarceration in a county jail.
I'm sure that the Bridges program is a help to some folks, but I can't help but notice that nowhere in the annual report do we find the number of individuals in the program who've been accused or convicted of committing additional crimes. In fact, the report is utterly silent on the crimes that the 4,600 participants were accused of committing before they were brought in to the Bridges program.
The biggest benefit seems to be the cost of the program compared to inpatient treatment or incarceration. I'm all in favor of saving money (I'm a fiscal conservative, after all), but expanding outpatient care doesn't change the fact that Colorado desperately needs more inpatient beds. The Bridges program looks like a way for the state to artificially bring down the lengthy wait times for people charged with crimes and ordered into psychiatric treatment by moving them into outpatient treatment when they really should be in a mental health facility.
Illinois has a similar shortage of inpatient beds, but rather than address that issue it looks like Democrats are looking for a cheap and easy (or at least easier) "fix" that isn't much of a fix at all. To make matters worse, and as we'll be discussing in an upcoming post, when a mentally ill (or mentally sound) person does commit a violent crime with a firearm, Democrat lawmakers want to punish the gun maker for the actions of the criminal.
Violent crime is dropping across Illinois, just as it is across most of the country. That's unquestionably good news, but the downward trend won't last forever. And if Illinois doesn't get serious about addressing the small population of individuals whose mental illness leads to a propensity for violence, the trend could reverse itself a lot sooner than lawmakers and the public would like.
