By Dustin Slaughter
At the intersection of mental health, treatment, and criminal justice, Arona Gur has built a career defined by a belief that legal systems work best when they focus not only on punishment, but on long-term human outcomes. Long before becoming Supervisor of the Mental Health Unit at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office (DAO), Gur initially envisioned herself as a clinician. “Originally, I thought I wanted to be like a mental health clinician, like a therapist,” she recalled. She earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology and worked at the Northeastern Treatment Center and later at Penn conducting research on court-mandated drug and alcohol treatment. There, she studied not only reductions in substance use, but whether people were able to obtain employment and comply with court conditions. The experience exposed her to how deeply unresolved legal problems could destabilize treatment and recovery. “I felt like their legal issues were really impacting their treatment and mental health,” she said. “So that’s what motivated me to attend law school.”
After graduating from the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University in 2015, Gur interned in the mental health unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. It was in this unit that she met Flo Messier, an attorney who would become Gur’s mentor at the Defender’s and, later, play a significant role in her decision to join the DAO (when Messier joined the office in 2018). Her experience at the Defender’s also gave her insight into how she could integrate her legal and clinical background into a viable career.
That realization eventually led her to child advocacy work at the Montgomery County Public Defender in 2017, where she represented children in dependency and delinquency matters. Working closely with teenagers, many navigating trauma, mental illness, and family instability, reinforced her belief that the justice system should prioritize rehabilitation and support whenever possible. “The purpose was to help kids and hopefully get kids help, parents help, and hopefully get kids reunited with parents,” she said.
Gur joined the DAO in March 2018, beginning in the office’s Juvenile Unit and later handling appeals in the Law Division before joining the Mental Health Unit in 2022. She was encouraged to join the unit by then-Mental Health Unit supervisor Flo Messier, a mentor Gur credits with shaping her professional philosophy. Messier passed away in August 2022. https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/flo-messier-obituary-philadelphia-district-attorney-mental-health-20220809.html
Today, Gur and her team oversee cases involving competency evaluations and treatment-centered resolutions for defendants experiencing serious mental illness. The unit handles matters ranging from low-level offenses to serious felonies, often involving defendants whose psychiatric conditions complicate traditional prosecution. “A lot of our cases deal with family members,” Gur noted, explaining that relatives frequently do not want incarceration for loved ones but intervention instead. The work requires balancing public safety, victims’ concerns, and treatment needs.
“There are a lot of other factors,” she said. “What the complainant wants, what’s best for the defendant, and the type of treatment needed.”
Gur frequently confronts situations involving severe mental illness, dementia, intellectual disabilities, or traumatic brain injuries where incarceration offers little benefit but communities and vulnerable individuals still require protection. “Jail and incarceration are a terrible thing for people with serious mental illness,” she said. At the same time, she acknowledges the enormous gaps in available services and long-term care infrastructure. “We also don’t have the social net and the services to really address these kinds of longstanding issues,” she added. The result is a criminal justice system often forced to serve as a default response to untreated psychiatric crises.
Outside the office, she finds grounding in her children, nature, yoga, and being outdoors.