Coalition: State needs lockup for mentally ill

FORT SMITH — Crisis intervention centers for the mentally ill would help reduce crowding in county jails and state prisons, according to a coalition of officials traveling the state to recruit support for funding.

The coalition consisting of the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association, the Association of Arkansas Counties and the Mental Health Coalition of Arkansas is calling for the state to fund a pilot program to develop at least one 16-bed unit as a place to send mentally ill people who otherwise would end up in a county jail.

Coalition members testified about the program last month before the Legislative Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force.

Task force co-chairman state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson,

R-Little Rock, agreed that funding is needed for programs for the mentally ill in the criminal justice system and said the task force is looking at funding for the pilot program.

But Hutchinson said the task force has to consider and prioritize funding for other criminal justice needs, as well. He said he didn’t believe that funding requests for the crisis center pilot program would be taken up until the 2017 legislative session.

Washington County Circuit Judge Cristi Beaumont, a legislative task force member, said other members also see addressing mental illness as an important component in reducing the prison population.

Judging from what other states have done, one crisis intervention unit in Arkansas would cost about $2.5 million a year to operate around the clock, mental health coalition board member Bonnie White said. That cost would include a mental health professional, a registered nurse and other staffing for the unit.

She said the startup cost would depend on whether the unit is in a new or repurposed building.

David Hudson, the county judge of Sebastian County and president of the Association of Arkansas Counties, said the pilot unit could be set in an area of the state that has larger populations, such as Fort Smith, Northwest Arkansas or Jonesboro.

Ultimately, he said, the coalition would like to see a unit in all of Arkansas’ 13 community health center catchment areas.

Fort Smith would be a good location for a unit, Hudson said, because of the Riverview Hope Campus that is under development. That campus site, south of downtown Fort Smith, is being designed as a centralized service center for the homeless.

Riverview Hope Campus coordinator Debbie Everly said the campus will include services for the mentally ill.

Hudson said that this week he plans to sign a resolution, passed last week by the association, that calls for adequate services for the mentally ill in jail, regional mental illness crisis units in Arkansas and crisis intervention training for law enforcement officers in dealing with the mentally ill.

The sheriffs’ association is expected to take up a similar resolution in January, Executive Director Ronnie Baldwin said.

Efforts have been made in the past to fund programs that would divert mentally ill people from jails to crisis centers, where they could be stabilized. Some were funded, but the money dried up. Other efforts to get state funding failed altogether.

An effort in 2007 to get funding for such a program failed, Hudson told a group of legislators, sheriffs, police chiefs, prosecutors and mental health officials during a meeting earlier this month in Fort Smith.

“It didn’t get any traction because nobody really cares about the mentally ill,” he said. “There is no allocation of priority money for the mentally ill within the state budget process.”

Often, deputies responding to a call encounter a mentally ill person causing a problem, Crawford County Sheriff Ron Brown said. If the person takes a swing at the deputy, the disturbance turns into a crime and the deputy has no alternative but to take the person to jail.

Brown said mental illness is, in effect, being criminalized in Arkansas.

Jail is an inappropriate setting for a mentally ill person, but there is nowhere else to take him, Sebastian County Sheriff Bill Hollenbeck

said.

“We’ve reached the point now where we know what we are doing is not working,” sheriffs’ association chief counsel Mark Whitmore told the officials in Fort Smith. “I can’t understand why we’re continuing to do things the same way when we know we are getting the same bad result.”

Hollenbeck and other coalition members visited San Antonio, which has a program that diverts the mentally ill from jail into a stabilization unit. He said the city’s recidivism rate dropped from 39 percent to 6 percent.

“So, what’s cheaper in the long run?” he asked the group. “Helping someone

get back on track with two weeks of stabilization versus sentencing someone to prison for 10 years?”

There are pockets in the state where efforts are being made to address the problem of mentally ill people in the criminal justice system.

Washington County Circuit Court has a mental health docket in its drug court that refers high-risk, high-needs mentally ill people to the Ozark Guidance Center for treatment.

Beaumont said the program was started in September 2014, and she believes it is making a difference. But because the program is relatively new, she said, she didn’t have any solid figures for comparison.