Overcrowding, understaffing and poor treatment for inmates with mental health issues held in Los Angeles jails underscore growing failures in America's mental health and justice systems.
A whiteboard nearby tracks how many days since guards on this floor had to forcibly restrain anyone: 54. These inmates haven't been violent, he says."Just to make sure that they're not walking around," Trimble says."If they don't take their medications, they could be deemed unpredictable.""I think everyone can agree that it's rather inhumane to have the inmate handcuffed while out," says LA Sheriff's Capt.
It's a culmination of decades of policies affecting those with a mental illness. Many of the nation's asylums and hospitals were closed over the past 60-plus years — some horrific places that needed to be shuttered, others emptied to cut costs. "Local jails and prisons have become the de facto mental health institutions," says Elizabeth Hancq, director of research at the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that works to eliminate barriers to treatment for people with severe mental illness."It's really a humanitarian crisis that if you suffer from a severe mental illness in this country, you almost need to commit a crime in order to get into the system.
"Without adequate and appropriate data collection and analysis on serious mental illness in our jails and prisons," Hancq says,"there can't be real accountability and oversight into what's going on." Thousands of people who've been declared incompetent to stand trial and who need mental health treatment, the magazine reports, are today warehoused in jails for unconstitutionally long periods before they are convicted or even tried for any crime.
"We have more than 140 individuals on any given day who could use an inpatient bed that we just cannot provide at the moment," Belavich says.By default, there's more of an emphasis on medication — critics say over-medication — and less on individual or group therapy. There's really no room for that. On several floors, bunk beds and makeshift living areas pack what should be"common use" areas.
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