People With Mental Health Crises Increasingly Landing in Jail

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I think we can all agree that the last thing a person in the middle of a mental health crisis needs is to be sent to jail. But according to a recent article in The Marshall Project, that’s exactly what’s happening.

This is especially true in rural areas, where people are jailed if a hospital bed or transportation to a hospital isn’t immediately available. Five states explicitly allow correctional facilities to be used for a mental health hold, but even in states without laws that allow this, it happens regularly.

“It’s a terrible solution…for what is, at the end of the day, a medical crisis,” said John Snook, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national group that advocates for the seriously mentally ill.

There are no national figures on how many people experience mental health holds in jail rather than in the hospital, but reports from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services say that since 2011, at least 22 hospitals have been cited for failing to stabilize patients in mental health crises and sending them to jail without even a psychiatric evaluation.

The problem has reached crisis levels due to a 96-percent decrease in the number of psychiatric beds over the past 50 years and increasing awareness of mental health needs have brought more people to emergency departments with mental health emergencies.

This is particularly true for the poor, since a 1972 federal law forbade the government from paying for inpatient mental health and drug treatment at psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds. Although the law was intended to help curb the “warehousing” of people with mental illnesses, it had the unintended consequence of leaving individual states to fund mental health care for people on public insurance.

One state has found a creative way to address the problem of jailing people with mental health emergencies. Colorado recently outlawed using jail to detain non-criminals having a psychiatric crisis. It used $9 million, two-thirds of which came from marijuana tax revenue, to pay for local crisis centers, training for law enforcement on how to deal with people having mental health crises, and transportation programs.

I can only hope that more states follow Colorado’s lead. As marijuana becomes legalized and states have an increasing amount of tax revenue available to deal with problems such as this, mental health emergencies should get treated like any other emergencies and the people experiencing them should get the help they need…not time in jail.