The chief officer at the Benton County jail last week defined a chronic problem for his department, as well as so many other jails and prisons across Arkansas and America.
"We are cops and not trained medical professionals. We are not equipped to strap someone down and check their vitals," Capt. Jeremy Guyll understated in a news story.
Neither are law enforcement and jail officers qualified to diagnose and treat the mentally ill who comprise so much of their inmate population today.
Since the early 1960s, when many thousands of mentally ill patients were released from mental institutions into ill-prepared community halfway houses, the burgeoning problem of how best to care for them has largely been left to criminal detention facilities.
I hardly believe the moral intent was to release from far-from-ideal facilities where at least they were provided relevant care by trained caregivers those requiring mental treatment into woefully inadequate and often destructive jail cells.
This isn't a recent problem. I recall writing about this scourge in the 1970s, 1980s, '90s. Today, this shameful situation is still making headlines.
The concept behind deinstitutionalization, like so many well-intentioned yet wholly impractical ideas, seemed reasonable, even kind at the time. Why keep those with mental disabilities confined in institutions to languish unless and until they were stabilized through medications and treatment?
So many such places had degenerated into dark castles of despair. I recall the former Willowbrook State School in New York (that propelled Geraldo Rivera to fame when he went in its back door with cameras rolling) had become a hellhole. The mentally ill were confined often in filthy, inhumane conditions that most saw as hell on earth.
Freeing those suffering mental disabilities into hopefully better lives naturally sounded humane and necessary in a society that valued empathy and compassion.
Yet the reality of that reform has proven to a significant degree as pie in the sky. Untold thousands of the mentally afflicted over the decades have wound up off their meds, homeless in the city streets and jailed in completely unsuitable facilities for committing criminal acts triggered by their unstable conditions. I call that a different form of living hell.
Studies show this problem remains a local and national disgrace with woefully too few beds in state psychiatric hospitals, including our own.
A whopping 25 percent of Washington County's inmates have mental illness.
NAMI reports up 400,000 inmates held in the nation's jails and prisons suffer from mental illnesses. Between 25 and 40 percent of all Americans with mental illness at some point pass through the criminal-justice system.
NAMI said about 70,000 prisoners in 2000 were actively psychotic. Nearly 25 percent of white state and locally incarcerated prisoners reported that they had a mental illness. Nearly 40 percent of white female inmates 24 or younger had mental illness.
Nineteen of 31 states responding to a survey reported a disproportionate increase in prisoners with mental illness in the previous five years, the report continued.
Most jail inmates with mental illnesses are charged with nonviolent offenses and treatment is the best way to prevent recidivism. Fifty-three percent of inmates with a mental illness were in prison for a violent offense, while 46 percent of inmates without mental illness were incarcerated for violence. Over half of all inmates with a mental illness report three or more previous sentences.
(DROP CAP) And so things pretty much have continued downward for decades now, with detention officers serving as untrained caretakers for so many among us with mental health problems.
There have to be better, more appropriate and genuinely effective ways to assist those obviously in need of effective mental health treatment. Thankfully, some ideas such as 24/7 mental health crisis centers and better relevant training for jailers are being pursued in Arkansas today.
Dumping so many thousands of mentally afflicted onto the streets certainly hasn't proven to be an act of compassion nearly as much as it continues to be a very expensive nightmare financially and morally.
Law enforcement agencies locally are doing the best they can to deal with conditions in their jails. Washington and Benton counties now have contracts to provide inmate health-care services, including a mental health professional for a couple of days each week.
Benton County's Guyll said a mental health nurse started working 16 hours a week in September. The need is so great, he hopes to find money to pay for an additional day weekly.
Sheriff Tim Helder said Washington County's mental health nurse, who started Nov. 1, is at the jail 18 hours a week. "If money were not an object, I would like someone on staff full time."
Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 12/13/2014