Vitek and beyond: the empirical context of prison-to-hospital transfers.

In the 1980 case of Vitek v. Jones, I the United States Supreme Court held that the transfer of a prison inmate to a mental hospital required an administrative hearing to determine whether the transfer was appropriate. This decision "broke new ground in the area of corrections law" since it concluded that "at least one change in a prisoner's status, by its very nature, could not be accomplished without some formal factfinding procedure." '2 A recent and comprehensive analysis of Vilek precludes the necessity of reviewing the legal precedents or reasoning of the case here. 3 The Supreme Court decided Vitek, however, without the benefit of any descriptive and analytic account of the empirical context in which decisions are made to transfer prisoners to mental hospitals. Without such information it is not possible to assess the extent to which Vitek addresses the central issues in the transfer process. This article, after summarizing the very limited existing research on the prison-to-mental hospital transfer process, presents the results of a study undertaken to fill that informational gap. The study gathered statistical data on the types of transfers that occur in six of the United States, the nature of the facilities to which prisoners are transferred, and the perceptions of the staff at the prisons and mental hospitals involved in the transfer of prisoners. One conclusion from this study is that Vitek must be read broadly as applying to the transfer of prisoners to mental health facilities operated by departments of corrections (DOGs), and not just to the transfer of prisoners to hospitals operated by departments of mental health (DMHs). This is essential