ABSTRACT
Jails in rural counties have been the root source of increased jail incarcerations across the United States and elsewhere since as early as the 1970s. A large proportion of jailed persons are pretrial status and have not yet been adjudicated. Although the demand for forensic mental health assessments is disproportionate to the number of providers able to conduct them, the need for such assessments in economically disadvantaged areas is particularly large. Lack of access to local qualified examiners can lead to problems including long wait-times for examiners from centralised state psychiatric hospitals, incentives to drop charges or offer quick plea deals that may infringe on a defendant's rights, or retaining examiners without specialised forensic mental health training. These outcomes may, in turn, lead to discrimination in the administration of justice. The use of remote evaluations has been gaining attention as a strategy for reducing wait times and costs for mental health experts while increasing access. This chapter will summarise the racial and economic imbalances in forensic assessment and discuss the ways in which remote evaluations could improve equity in expert access and subsequent legal decisions, as well as practice and policy limitations associated with using videoconferencing systems for psycho-legal purposes.
