Stop treating mental illness as a crime.

When Steve Leifman became a judge, he had no idea he was becoming the "gatekeeper of the largest psychiatric facility in Florida."

And, he said, "unfortunately, that's the Dade County Jail."

Now, Leifman--associate administrative judge of the Miami-Dade County Court Criminal Division and chair of the Florida Supreme Court Task Force on Substance Abuse and Mental Health Issues in the Courts--continues his crusade to stop treating mental illness like a crime.

Those efforts include the creation of Florida's 19 mental health courts, with the first one in the U.S. in Broward County. It's Judge Leifman's personal opinion that legislation is needed to change the Baker Act to give judges on the civil side more authority to keep the mentally ill involuntarily hospitalized longer.

Talking to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Criminal and Civil Justice, Leifman played the sobering video by CBS Channel 4 TV in Miami called "The Forgotten Floor," where four to five men with mental illnesses are locked in a cell built for one, pacing and shivering as they wait their turn to sleep on a cold metal bed, some locked up for months.

"It's a bad secret and a sad secret," Judge Leifman says in the video.

In the years since that 2006 video, the secret has been told and told again, as the criminal justice system struggles to deal with nearly 180,000 people a year who need acute mental health treatment at the time of their arrests.

On November 6, Leifman told the senators that he believes the Baker Act, the process for involuntary civil commitment, needs to be changed to give judges more authority to help mentally ill people get treatment in order to keep them out of the system's jails and prison cells. Instead of just gauging "imminent danger to self or others," Leifman suggests the standard should include treatment options.

"Florida is one of four states left that has an extraordinarily high standard to involuntarily hospitalize, meaning that, in order for the court to order someone into treatment, they have to meet criteria which say they are imminently dangerous to themselves or others.

"Dangerousness is a standard that was developed in the 1700s," Leifman said. "We need to really consider treatment, not just dangerousness, because most of them aren't dangerous in that capacity, like we think. Most of it is going to be suicide.... If they are hitting the system again and again, the court probably needs greater authority to be able to keep them in...