New Mexico’s House Bill 8, recently introduced as part of a broader public safety package, seeks to address legitimate systemic failures in our state’s approach to mental health and criminal justice. The current practice of dismissing cases when defendants are deemed not competent to stand trial has created an ineffective revolving door, where individuals cycle through the criminal justice system without accessing needed treatment. Governor Lujan Grisham and the bill’s sponsors rightly identify this as an untenable situation requiring legislative remedy.
However, while HB 8’s intentions are noble, its approach to criminal competency threatens to exacerbate existing problems while potentially violating civil rights. The bill’s expansion of criminal commitment criteria and authorization of forced treatment before conviction, though aimed at breaking the cycle of recidivism, risks further criminalizing mental illness while failing to address the fundamental challenges in our behavioral health system.
HB 8 perpetuates the myth that mental illness equals dangerousness by expanding the criteria for criminal commitment. This approach ignores the real crisis: New Mexico’s severe shortage of community-based mental health services. Consider the current reality: The waiting list for a competency evaluation in New Mexico is months long or nonexistent in rural areas. HB 8 would dramatically increase demand for these evaluations while providing no mechanism to expand evaluation capacity. The result? More individuals with mental health conditions languishing in detention facilities or homeless on the streets– not because they’ve been convicted of any crime, but because they’re waiting for treatment in a system that cannot accommodate them and worse the treatment system as outlined in HB8 does not exist…