Small-scale offenders with mental health issues are finally getting the attention they deserve.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Sylvia Rambo approved a federal lawsuit accusing the state of Pennsylvania of violating the rights of defendants with mental health issues by subjecting them to unconstitutional, yearlong wait times to stand trial.
For defendants with mental health issues, Pennsylvania has the longest wait times in jail or state mental health facilities in the country, with California in second place with an average wait time of 75 days versus 130 days in Pennsylvania. Judges often consider people with mental illnesses incompetent to stand trial, and despite being accused of petty crimes, they have no family, friends or funds to challenge their imprisonment.
Rather than subjecting people with mental illnesses to more grief, we need to provide them with treatment services.
Pennsylvania must reallocate the taxpayer dollars that go toward incarcerating the mentally ill to rehabilitation services. To protect those with mental illnesses, we must open mental health treatment slots for those who cannot competently defend themselves in court and follow through with treatment after their release.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the gridlock in the state’s mental health system was becoming a major problem for criminal defendants who judges deemed incompetent. In October, an Allegheny County resident prompted the ACLU of Pennsylvania to take action through a complaint about the treatment of mentally ill prisoners.
“In the last year and a half alone, the numbers were beyond our belief — of wait times, of lack of treatment, of lack of resources,” Luna Patella, a lawyer with the Defender Association of Philadelphia said in a press conference Wednesday..
This isn’t the first attempt to treat defendants suffering from mental illness in Pennsylvania.
Last November, Republican Congressperson Tim Murphy brought a mental health bill with sweeping reforms to the floor of Congress. The reforms included provisions that make it easier for judges to mandate outpatient treatment and for caregivers to access mental health treatment plans for violent patients with severe conditions. Murphy hoped to allow treatment for people who may otherwise end up in prison despite petty offenses, such as stealing candy from a convenience store. His bill gathered bipartisan support, but it has stalled — members of Congress are concerned this bill would strip patients of their privacy.
We can’t allow this issue to continue to stall. According to a Washington Post article from April 2015, a shocking number of Americans with mental illnesses end up in prison instead of in treatment.
A study of 132 suicide attempts in a county jail in Washington state found that 77 percent of the attempts were by inmates with “chronic psychiatric problems,” compared with 15 percent among the rest of the jail population. Inmates with mental illnesses are a threat to themselves while in prison, and without treatment, are at a high risk for injury and death,
Aligned with this study is the Treatment Advocacy Center report from 2012, which found American prisons and jails to house an estimated 356,268 inmates with several mental illness in 2012. That’s 10 times the number of mentally ill patients committed to state psychiatric hospitals in 2012, which is about 35,000 people.
Our justice system has essentially used prisons as makeshift mental health care facilities where people with mental illnesses endure further trauma in lieu of treatment. And the prognosis is grim for defendants after prison release.
When released, prisoners receive virtually no mental health care despite a dire need for it. Naturally, this absence of care results in higher recidivism rates, as well as a sense of abandonment. We aren’t combatting crime this way, but rather pushing released inmates into a trajectory that results in readmittance to the system that didn’t treat the issue in the first place.
We can no longer ignore the massive oppression the justice system has inflicted upon people with mental illnesses in our state. We have turned our prisons into mental health institutions, acting under the false assumption that tossing the mentally ill into a cell will cloak and solve everything.
Pennsylvania needs to convene and enforce the new legislation that will provide meaningful treatment for defendants with mental illnesses and continue to refer them to treatment centers beyond release.
We must also not stop at yesterday’s progress — we need to continue reforming mental health treatment to cater to those who have been neglected and break the cycle.