KADNER: Mentally ill people sit in jail and get little help

Too often the little victories, the signs that government can work, are ignored.

One of those victories occurred earlier this month when Gov. Bruce Rauner signed legislation designed to get mentally ill people out of county jails and into treatment facilities.

These are people who have been judged incompetent to stand trial but languish in county jail cells for months because the state has nowhere to put them.

State Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, the Senate sponsor of H.B. 649, said the measure had bipartisan support in the state legislature, along with the backing from the Illinois Sheriffs Association (including Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart), the Illinois Department of Human Services, and the governor.

“Everyone just realized it was wrong to have these people, the seriously mentally ill, sitting in jail cells where they didn’t belong,” Cunningham said. “There was already a process in place for dealing with these situations, but it really wasn’t working due to cuts in mental health services over many years. So these inmates were often allowed to languish in jails for long periods of time, not only in Cook County, but downstate as well.

“It was bad not only for these individuals, but their fellow inmates, and the local corrections officers who had to deal with the situation.”

Downstate jails often have fewer resources to deal with the mentally ill than Cook County, which has become the largest mental institution in Illinois. Dart has estimated that one-third of the 10,000 inmates there are suffering from mental health problems.

The individuals covered by the recent legislation are in such bad shape that a judge has deemed them unable to participate in their own defense, or not guilty by reason of insanity.

Despite court orders that they be placed in care, the state Department of Human Services has been so backlogged with cases due to years of budget cuts that officials simply ignored requests from corrections officials to pick up the inmates.

As of Aug. 7, according to sheriff’s officials, Cook County Jail had 20 people awaiting transfer to the DHS. That included a 62-year-old woman charged with criminal trespass who had waited 117 days for placement in a mental health care facility.

This woman had entered an apartment building, gone to the laundry room and decided to sleep on the floor. The landlord and tenants complained that she had repeatedly entered the apartment building’s lobby, sometimes urinating and defecating there.

She had been arrested nearly a dozen times for similar minor infractions all traceable to her mental illness. She finally was transported to a mental institution after Rauner signed the new law. She had been sitting in a cell for more time than she would have served had she been convicted.

That woman was one of 16 individuals who had waited more than 25 days since their orders of mental incompetence were issued, according to a statement released by the Cook County sheriff.

The new state law requires that court clerks notify DHS within five days when a court order has been issued mandating that a jail inmate be assigned to mental health treatment. There previously had been no deadline for the orders to go out.

Under the new law, DHS is required to evaluate the defendant to determine placement within 20 days of receiving the order.

If DHS doesn’t show up at a jail within that time frame, the sheriff’s office can transport the inmate to the nearest state mental health facility.

The larger problem is that too many mentally ill people end up in jails and prisons because treatment is not a priority in this country. This is a small victory. You have to start somewhere.

Email: philkadner@gmail.com

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