RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A seminar organized by Brazil's judicial oversight body is analyzing how to better implement a law that prohibits keeping mentally ill patients behind bars once they've served their sentence.
Participants at Tuesday's daylong seminar said the 11-year-old law is often not followed. Judges participated in a massive overview of cases of patients held in the criminal justice system's treatment centers and found hundreds of people who should have been released years or decades ago.
Legal experts said sometimes there's no adequate review of patients' legal and clinical cases or no resources to support the patient outside the justice system.
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