Spike in mentally ill inmates leads to new policies
LOS ANGELES — Perhaps the largest group of mentally ill inmates in the U.S. resides in Los Angeles in one of the world’s largest jail complexes.
Over the past seven years, the jail’s population has spiked almost 50 percent — with nearly every inmate having both mental illness and substance abuse problems — and officials suspect the rise is due to methamphetamine use.
The Twin Towers Correctional Facility is home to about 4,000 mentally ill inmates. The increase in the number of mentally ill prisoners — about 30 percent of the county’s total jail population — has led the sheriff’s department to adapt its policies as deputies and clinicians work to treat people dealing with both psychiatric disorders and substance abuse.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell has blamed the surge on meth use, but doctors say it’s often difficult to distinguish whether the patients had underlying conditions and then started using drugs, or if their chronic drug use led to psychiatric disorders.
Chronic use of meth, a highly addictive stimulant, can cause paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations and delusions, studies have shown.
“It’s causing people previously healthy to become mentally ill, and we’re going to be dealing with those individuals in one way or another for the rest of their lives,” McDonnell said.
Sheriff’s officials say they’ve started training deputies specifically in dealing with mental illness and focusing on treatment instead of punishment.
“No one ever expected jails and prisons to be mental health institutions,” said Kelly Harrington, the assistant sheriff in Los Angeles who oversees the county jail system. “The deputies, although they don’t have specific psychiatric- or psychology-type degrees, we give them as much training as we possibly can in the short period of time we have them.”
The American Civil Liberties Union routinely receives complaints from Twin Towers inmates who say they haven’t been able to see doctors or psychiatrists, haven’t received their medication and that their medical needs are being ignored, said Esther Lim, Jails Project director at the ACLU of Southern California.
“The jail has a history of not providing adequate medical care or mental health care,” she said.
Harrington said he has heard similar complaints but noted the jail system has made significant progress in recent years to ensure inmates receive proper care. Still, he concedes, more work needs to be done.