For those found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity and put into California's CONREP program, strict supervision can last decade
Venus Moore had been released from the California psychiatric hospital where she was confined for years. But she was far from free.
The pandemic was raging, and her sister could provide a safe place for her to live. But Moore, 48, was required instead to live locked inside a care home for seniors. She was not allowed to drive, work, open a bank account, travel or date.
The restrictions stemmed from something that had happened two decades earlier. In 2001, diagnosed with a mental illness and experiencing hallucinations, she stabbed a relative. She was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and inflicting great bodily injury. If she had been found guilty of these crimes, she could have served up to seven years in prison. Instead, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a state hospital indefinitely.
After years of treatment, her doctors decided in 2012 that she was stable enough to return to Los Angeles. She was put on “forensic conditional release,” more commonly known as CONREP: a statewide outpatient program that primarily supervises and treats people leaving psychiatric hospitals who landed there because of serious criminal charges.
Most people in the program, like Moore, were found not guilty by reason of insanity, often for violent crimes, but after years of hospitalization, were ready for mental health care in the community.
CONREP, which oversees roughly 650 Californians, is meant to help patients transition from institutions to independence, while also trying to prevent violent relapses. But according to a Marshall Project investigation, many patients, family members, former employees and attorneys say the system can trap people for decades in a legal limbo, one that dictates where former patients live, whether they work, and whom they see.
For those with a serious mental illness, getting out from under court control can be far more difficult than for others in the justice system. The program highlights the tension at the core of many mental health care debates today, between a concern for public safety and a patient’s rights and liberties.
“Everybody’s familiar with probation and parole,” said Jean Matulis, a lawyer who has represented people on CONREP since 1991. “This is all-inclusive, complete control of every moment of the person’s waking life.” And it can continue “forever and ever.”
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