Home | Tracey T. Chappell for Jackson County Prosecutor | Kansas City

There is nothing that I agree with more than we need to have a method of getting the mentally ill and heavy substance abusers into resident care. The problem is that the patient rights movement during the 70's has made it extremely difficult to involuntarily commit someone against their wishes. If you are mentally ill or a heavy substance abuser, what you want to do is probably going to kill you. If you have worked with homeless programs, my experience is that at least 40 percent of those in these homes are mentally incapable of dealing with society and the majority of the rest are alcoholics and drug addicts, and it is hard to really know where one leaves off and the other begins. What our program today is really that we just leave them on the street until they do something serious enough to go to prison. That's one hell of a mental health program.

Then they are released too early.

SPC Johnathan Baldree; Dear Johnathan, if I may indeed, address you by your first name; and, My Rally Point Brothers, and, Sisters: my late/Beloved father, the Hon. James Sloane Higgins, was a Federal Administrative Law Judge. Prior to that, my late/Adored father was a civil defense lawyer.