Jails do a much better job of housing the criminal element than they can ever be expected to do in treating the mentally ill, who are routinely marched into cellblocks in the Atlanta region and across the state.
Sweeping mentally challenged people off our streets and into jails, often for minor nuisance offenses, does little more than conceal what remains a serious problem in Georgia, even as the state works to improve care. We’re not alone; other states are struggling with the same issue. We must fix it.
Frequent incarceration of the mentally ill conveniently removes them from public view. What it does not do — despite good intentions by jailers — is effectively address the illnesses that drew law enforcement attention in the first place. That’s a tragedy for the mentally fragile among us and also for the taxpayers whose dollars would be more effectively spent on community-based treatment, not haphazard detention.
Two days of reporting in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution late last month addressed this problem, asserting that “jails have become the new asylums. In Georgia, more mentally ill people are locked away than are treated in all the state psychiatric hospitals combined.”
The next line noted that the situation is “costing county taxpayers millions.”
Fulton County Sheriff Ted Jackson told the AJC that, “The county taxpayers are paying for something the state should be covering.”
“Locking up people because they are mentally disturbed is unfair to them and to the county taxpayers who are footing the bill. It just isn’t right,” he said.
The numbers he speaks of are large ones. Last year, Fulton county spent $4 million treating mentally ill prisoners. Of the county jail’s 2,300 inmates, about 460 — or one in five — are on psychotropic drugs. That doesn’t include those who may be mentally ill, but aren’t on medication. The situation is similar in both dollars and inmate numbers across the metro area.
It should stop. There’s no fiscal sense in paying jail guards to assume duties best left to mental health professionals. Keeping this problem behind jailhouse walls does nothing to fix it, or manage the costs incurred.
It’s well-known that Georgia, for years, did a shameful job of caring for the state’s mentally ill. We weren’t alone, as mental hospitals across the nation began to empty out after a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that people couldn’t be civilly committed to institutions unless they were a danger to themselves or others.
It was thought then and now that mental illness was best treated through community-based programs. They were either never widely implemented or were too underfunded to be truly effective. That led to a path from asylum rooms to jail cells.
Georgia reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and agreed to move patients out of mental hospitals and into treatment programs after the AJC ran an earlier series of articles chronicling neglect and abuse in psychiatric hospitals.
To state officials’ credit, this year $94 million for mental health community services was added to the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities’ $1.15 billion budget. The agency’s spokesman says it is the only department that received a funding increase from the Legislature in a tick-tight fiscal year. More mental health-focused courts and other initiatives have been launched.
That remains good news, especially considering Georgia’s infamous past performance in this regard. That more and better treatment initiatives are coming online is laudable.
It is still not enough. Not when estimates of those with mental illness range from 16 to 25 percent of the 40,000 prisoners housed in the state’s 159 county jails in 2009.
State and local officials must find a way to reallocate toward real treatment some of the money that’s now spent by counties to keep the mentally ill behind bars. That will likely only happen when taxpayers push state lawmakers to further ramp up mental health treatment programs. Counties should then see savings as jail populations thin out.
Taxpayers and the mentally ill will both be better off when that happens.
Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board.
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