LAKELAND (Jan. 22, 2009) – State Sen. Paula Dockery urged more than 200 people attending Thursday night’s Florida Lecture Series to write their legislators to urge them to preserve funding for mental illness programming and to support cost-effective mental illness prevention legislation. She said the cost of prevention is far less than intervention.

The College presented Sen. Dockery with a citation recognizing her service to the community and the state, and her service as chair of the Senate’s Committee on Criminal Justice.

The lecture, “The Criminalization of Mental Illness in Florida: Crisis and Opportunity for the Justice System,” co-presented by Dr. Risdon Slate of FSC and Dr. W. Wesley Johnson of the University of Southern Mississippi, focused on the problem of the mentally ill being sent to jails and prisons rather than hospitals.

Read more about the lecture in The Ledger.