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| Mental Illness Up at Georgia Jail |
| By Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, GA |
| Published: 11/25/2002 |
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Mentally ill prisoners are an increasing percentage of inmates at the Muscogee County Jail. Eighteen percent of the inmates in the county jail suffer from mental illness, according to Paul Morris, Health Services Administrator for the jail. 'The Muscogee County Jail has become, through default, a mental hospital,' he said during the Mayor's Committee for Persons with Disabilities meeting Thursday afternoon at the Government Center. The shift of the mentally ill from hospitals to jails costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year. One solution is creating mental health courts similar to the drug courts being tested today, Morris said. The mental health courts would divert patients from jails into appropriate treatment programs. As with drug courts, if offenders refused treatment, they would be sent to jail. Legislators have begun work toward making those courts a reality. A bipartisan group of U.S.Senate and House leaders introduced legislation this month that would authorize grants to fund collaborative efforts between community mental health programs and correctional mental health programs. The Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act of 2002 was introduced in the Senate as bill S3147 and in the House as bill HR5701. Although the legislation did not pass in the final days of this congressional session, legislators will reintroduce it in January, Morris said. 'It may not be a crime or become a crime if we can get to people in time,' he said. Since the 1960s, governments have deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, Morris said. County inpatient programs were replaced with outpatient clinics and regional inpatient care. Mental health funding was slashed. Patients also were given additional rights, including the right to remove themselves from care and refuse to take medication. 'Those with the least ability to exercise clear judgment have the right to comply or not with their therapy,' Morris said. Morris illustrated his talk with the example of a schizophrenic without a strong support system. That person could function on medication, achieving a level of normalcy. Under the current system, once the patient felt OK, he might stop taking his medication, Morris said. The person who functioned well while medicated would spiral out of control without the medication. Without a mental health safety net, that patient would likely get in trouble with the law, thus facing legal and mental health problems simultaneously. As a result, when state and federal governments have reduced funding for public health and mental health facilities during the past decades, they have been forced to increase funding for correctional facilities, Morris said. The reality is that housing a mentally ill person in the jail costs significantly more than housing that same person in an institution, Morris said. 'The problem is that someone thinks that if you're not paying for adequate mental health, you're not paying,' he said. Treating a patient in the jail costs taxpayers $38,000 a year, Morris said. Treating someone in an inpatient mental health facility costs between $24,000 and $26,000. If that person could successfully be treated on an outpatient basis, the treatment would cost only $12,000 a year. 'Either we're going to pay to treat them in the hospital or the jail,' Morris said. 'You pay for it either way.' |
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