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Justice for People with Disabilities

October 27th, 2009

Editorial in NYTimes.com

After eight years of the Bush administration using the power of the Justice Department to undermine civil rights laws, it is good to see the department applying one of those laws, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. It has started a timely new initiative aimed at full enforcement of that law, which forbids unjustified isolation of the mentally disabled and requires that they be integrated into the wider community where appropriate.

The initiative is having its coming-out party in New York, where Justice Department lawyers are seeking to intervene in a closely watched federal lawsuit involving thousands of mentally ill people being held in privately run adult homes. A federal judge recently described them as “even more restrictive or ‘institutional’ than psychiatric hospitals” that they were intended to replace.

In a ruling last month, the federal judge, Nicholas Garaufis, painted a dismaying picture of adult “homes” that in no way complied with federal law and that were more like jails than houses. In these places, mentally ill people who did not present a danger to themselves or to others had little of the privacy, freedom or enriching activities that would help them develop full, independent lives.

That thousands of New Yorkers were still confined in this way is striking since the state already knows the right way to do it. New York is known nationally for vibrant, innovative housing developments where mentally ill people live successfully and independently while receiving mental health and other services from community-based groups.

The judge has already required the state to produce a plan for correcting this egregious situation with the warehousing of the mentally disabled. But in the letter announcing its intent to intervene, the Justice Department said this matter was “a great concern” to the federal government. It said it wanted a role in the process because the remedy designed in New York might serve as a national model for dealing with this problem. The onus is now on the state to come up with that remedy.