By KAY CAMPBELL
Times Staff Writer

BIRMINGHAM - Progress in Morgan and Madison counties toward forming mental health courts demonstrates the improvements in Alabama's treatment of criminal defendants with mental illness, says Kathy Sawyer, commissioner of the state's mental health department.

"Alabama has moved so much farther along than you can ever believe," Sawyer said Friday to a group of about 250 mental health and law enforcement professionals from around the state. She gave credit to a 33-year-old lawsuit against the state's mental health system, Wyatt v. Stickney, which was settled in December.

"Wyatt moved Alabama in ways many states didn't move," Sawyer said.

Morgan and Madison counties are among six places in the state considering courts designed to deal with those accused of crimes who also have mental health problems.

Mentally ill defendants can choose to have their cases heard in that court. Such courts, already in use in Birmingham and Florence, utilize community resources to help the accused work out their punishment and a rehabilitation plan.

Establishing those courts and using mental health officers in them illustrate how the state's criminal justice and mental health systems are beginning to work together, Sawyer said. Such collaborations are necessary to help reduce the number of people held in and returning to prisons, she said.

"Otherwise we are always going to have to build more prisons," Sawyer said.

Sawyer's remarks closed a two-day conference on the criminal justice system and mental illness organized by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Alabama and sponsored by law enforcement, mental health agencies and the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Psychiatry.

It was the second annual meeting held to finds ways to deal more effectively with mentally ill defendants.

Many of the changes made since last year's conference resulted from establishing local task forces that get experts talking together.

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