[acb-hsp] Mentally Ill Being Sent to Jail

[Baracco, Andrew W]

Care for the mentally ill is not something that the for profit
healthcare system wants to take on, because many require lifetime care
and management, and there is simply no profit in it.

Andy


-----Original Message-----
From: acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org [mailto:acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org] On Behalf
Of peter altschul
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 9:05 AM
To: Acbhsp
Subject: [acb-hsp] Mentally Ill Being Sent to Jail

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.
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