The Mentally Ill Offender in Federal Criminal Law and Administration

Abstract

THE care and custody of the mentally ill has customarily been considered a state and local rather than a federal function. Certainly the major burden of performing this task of public assistance and police protection is carried by local government agencies, to the extent that it does not still rest on the shoulders of families and relatives. It is also customarily believed that the mentally ill or defective offender is infrequently encountered in federal law enforcement. For there have been fewer homicide trials in federal courts than in state courts, and it is in such cases that the defense of insanity is most often raised. Homicide apart, a conception of federal crime as typified by larger scale depredations and more complex schemes than the delinquencies popularly associated with mental cases has also been rather widespread and misleading. Although these two notions regarding the incidence of mental cases in the federal penal process once had a factual basis, they are increasingly invalid, both because of the progressive expansion of federal criminal legislation and the fact that we have only recently begun to learn to recognize mental illness readily.