[acb-hsp] Mentally Ill Being Sent to Jail

[peter altschul]

Mental Health Funding Cuts Sending Many Innocents to Prison
  Sy Mukherjee March 7, 2013



The Great Recession, in conjunction with states' propensities to 
cut Medicaid benefits in the face of the rising cost of health 
care services, led to some of the biggest cuts to state mental 
health care services in U.S.  history between 2009 and 2011.  Of 
course, the population of Americans with mental health problems 
didn't just disappear in that time.  Facing a shortage of 
adequate medical resources, many of them are now ending up in the 
only place that will take them: America's jails.
  According to CBS News, a shortage of mental health facilities 
and adequate treatment resources -- particularly in large states 
like Illinois and California -- has produced an untenable status 
quo in which the prison system serves as an alternate pipeline to 
funnel through sick Americans, who have nowhere else to go:
  Police logs in twelve cities revealed that mental health crisis 
calls have increased an average of 37.5 percent over the last 
four years.
  Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca says more mentally-ill 
people end up in jail when they're not getting the medications 
they need.  [...]
  "I believe it is, I think that medication is the stabilizer for 
most mentally-ill people," said Baca.  "The money for that dried 
up with our California economy going south and when they go off 
their meds, they go back to the behavior that leads to a law 
enforcement solution."
  Kathryn Wooten of Los Angeles called 911 for help when her 
23-year-old son Terrence suffered a mental breakdown in October 
2011.



"The police came and I thought they were going to take him to the 
hospital but he wind up in county jail," said Wooten.



Police say with few mental health beds available at state 
facilities, they have no choice but to leave the fate of people 
like Terrence Wooten to the criminal justice system.



"They have a mental ward in county but he wasn't really getting 
the counseling and the therapy that he needed," said Wooten.
  To state the obvious, prisons are not treatment facilities, and 
guards are not professionally trained medical personnel -- a fact 
that law enforcement authorities understand all too well.  "This 
is something that happens all the time here and the heart of it 
is, we're not a mental health facility.  These people should not 
be here," said [3]Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.  "These people by 
and large are not criminals.  They're people with mental illness 
but when they act out they end up in the jails because it's the 
only place that'll take them."
  California could serve as the poster child for what happens 
when slashes to mental health care funding -- particularly 
through cuts to public insurance programs such as Medicaid -- 
meets a sprawling industrial prison complex bursting at the 
seams.  Patients become prisoners, reminiscent of a time when 
ignorance regarding mental illnesses perpetuated a system of 
asylums and involuntary commitment that public health advocates 
spent decades fighting, as it treated mentally ill Americans as 
dangerous vagrants to be locked up rather than patients to be 
cured.  In fact, the mentally ill are not predisposed to 
violence, and are more likely to be the victims of violent acts 
than anything else.
  But now, poor access to facilities in the face of states' 
budget cuts have left the mentally ill -- particularly the 
low-income mentally ill, who have access to even fewer resources 
than their wealthier counterparts -- with few places to go.
  It's a particularly devastating dynamic considering that 
states' spending on prisons is the fastest growing budgetary item 
behind Medicaid.  However, while Medicaid costs have risen due to 
the general rise of health care costs, states' decisions to 
invest more in prisons in order to incarcerate -- rather then 
rehabilitate -- increasing numbers of Americans is a conscious 
and deliberate choice.