Houston Landing Series on Deadly Detention

There have been two stories so far and both use an individual example of someone with clear mental health issues who wound up in jail due to a lack of other available options and then wound up dead.

Texans with mental illnesses are dying in Houston-area jails. They didn’t need to be there.

Nearly 200 people with mental illnesses died in Texas jails. The death toll is getting worse.

The numbers are disturbing, but the story is familiar. This quote maybe explains it best:

“We are not surprised by your finding,” said Jason Spencer, chief of staff for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. “We believe more resources should be directed toward addressing the mental health crisis outside of a jail setting. Unfortunately, we find that too many people coming into the jail have serious mental health needs that are not being addressed outside the jail.”

Texas cut funding for community programs by $101 million in 2003. This has left many people with mental health problems homeless, and involved with emergency rooms and law enforcement more than they are with mental health care. Once in prison, the staff there is not equipped to deal with mental health issues, and inmates deteriorate to the point of dying by suicide or the results of some other violent interaction with other inmates or staff.

Because prison is no place to get better.

Yet, when we read the stories we read about men, and yes many of them are black men, who are trying to sort out their lives but can’t get a medication refill because they couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor, or who are identified as a suicide risk but left in a jail with untrained staff. (One example, an inmate was dead within 40 minutes of being given a blanket and left alone despite already having been identified as a suicide risk.)

There can be a year-long wait for a mental health in-patient treatment bed, and that’s in areas that actually have them to start with. For many that could mean a year of waiting in prison, which is a year of their mental health getting worse.

That’s a problem. Building more jails isn’t going to solve it. Creating processes that help identify inmates with mental health issues but not the resources to immediately get them into treatment isn’t helping either. The numbers will just get higher. The only thing that will help is getting more resources to the people who need them. But we don’t. I believe the biggest reason we don’t is that we don’t see homeless people with mental health issues who run into legal problems as people who are worth the effort.

We can talk about all the reasons for that, the way we have become so mind-controlled by consumerism that only people in “productive” careers have value or the way we view the poor in general as less than or even the fear we have in even thinking about mental health, but it all comes down to not caring enough about other people to do more. It won’t save everyone, we know that. Sadly, we haven’t identified a treatment that would successfully treat everyone. But we could do a lot more than we do.

We choose not to every time we elect leaders who choose not to.