Judge Milton Mack

Let's give you a comparison.

New York State is where Kendra's Law was adopted.

And that's where in 1999 they started the idea of assisted outpatient treatment.

So New York State right now has about 2,500 people on AOT with a population of 20 million.

In Michigan, Genesee County, with a population of 400,000, has about 800 people on AOT orders.

So New York City, or New York State rather, used AOT the way Genesee County does here in Michigan.

They have 20,000 people on AOT.

It's a preferred option to hospitalization.

When we go off the hospitalization route, what that involves is the police go to someone's home, like the parents, and they go down and they effectively arrest the parent's son and then take him out into a squad car in front of the neighbors and transport him to the hospital where he's held against his will for a few days, pretending a trial in front of a judge on a black road.

Now, that experience is pretty traumatic.

Yes, that's what everyone says.

Why do we have to do it that way?

And we don't have to do it that way.

We inflict trauma, and then the period of hospitalization is a few days.

In fact, we measure length of stay by hundreds of a day.

So we say, okay, the average length of stay in Wayne County is 6.25 days.

I don't know what the length of stay is now, but it's typically less than seven days.

Judicial leadership really does matter.

And after the Myers-Briggs personality profile, basically I signed a paper on this by judges, and judges tend to be introverts, and they tend to be reluctant to engage directly with the legislature.

But you have to find the judicial leadership at each level.