Harris Center saves lives
Such community mental health jail diversion programs deserve more funding.
Ever since she got out of prison more than two years ago, Vankey Jones has had a rough go of it. She landed in prison after she got in a fight with a man who she said pushed her elderly mother down at a Burlington Coat Factory. It was a bad fight and the felony conviction stuck with her. It was hard to hang onto jobs once employers found out about her history, hard to find stable housing, just hard. Then one rainy night, with nowhere to go, she tried her luck at the Salvation Army but they were all out of beds.
“I cried my heart out standing there,” she said, drenched in the rain as the woman shut the door in her face, unable to even give her some dry clothes.
Still on the streets, she could’ve ended up with another charge, likely a misdemeanor for trespassing. Instead, she got another chance through the county’s mental health jail diversion program. Her daughter, Gregorianne Burks, had gone through the program earlier and swore by it. It’s not a shelter, she promised her. So when law enforcement picked her up at an encampment and they mentioned diversion as an alternative to arrest, she accepted. The Harris County Jail is in the midst of a crisis of overcrowding and near record numbers of inmate deaths. Begun in 2018, the diversion program has helped more than 6,000 people stay out of jail, connecting them instead to the Harris Center’s voluntary program where they can get the help they need and set up with a path forward.
Addressing the crisis at the county’s jail, now under investigation by the FBI, means holding fewer people in jail and for less time. Diversion programs are just one piece of that. And the program is just one piece of what Harris Center, the largest mental health and developmental disability care center in Texas, does.
Here, Jones has a bed, a sliding glass door and a window. Things she doesn’t take for granted after prison and living on the streets and in shelters. She’ll be at the center’s southeast campus for a few more days while she sorts out her next steps through the after-care program.
“This is heaven compared to some of the places I’ve been,” she said. “You can literally see help, you can see one step at a time.”
While heaven might be free to clients, it still costs. That’s why a group of mayors including Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner signed onto a letter recently asking the Legislature for almost $156 million to fund salary increases for the 39 community mental health centers across the state, matching what’s already been promised to employees working in state hospitals and statesupported living centers.
Most community mental health centers are experiencing high staff turnover, with shortages that often pre-date the pandemic. It’s not the worst it’s been, but there are still about 180 open positions at the Harris Center and every hire helps make sure that they have the best resources available to do their jobs.
“In some cases, we have to raise our caseloads a bit,” Wayne Young, chief operating officer, said. Twice-a weekvisits might drop to once a week for care coordinators out in the community. The support is still there, but it’s not as robust as it could be.
The southeast campus doesn’t have many frills. It is located in a former hospital tucked behind an apartment complex and was once slated to become a detention center for children separated from adults at the border. There’s an outdoor area with workout equipment, basketball hoops and a fledgling garden. There are a few lounge areas inside and a small cafeteria. Most of the rest of the center is bedrooms and treatment spaces. In addition to the diversion program, the campus also hosts an array of programs for low-income people with mental health needs as well as intellectual and developmental disabilities. Beyond their four clinics, they also work in schools and even coordinate care in people’s homes if that’s where they need it. And they provide the mental health care inside the Harris County Jail.
Harris Center recently got a boost from the state and county to do more jail-based competency restoration, which helps people become competent enough to stand trial. They work with people who have been declared incompetent. Sometimes it involves therapy or medication, even mock trials to make sure they really understand what’s at stake. Not everyone can be declared competent but working through that process ensures that they don’t sit around waiting without even ever getting to trial. That is one step toward addressing the county’s backlog of cases. But the diversion program also shows how we can limit the number of people who are ever even exposed to the criminal justice system. When the city recently cleared an encampment, redirecting many of the people to its new Navigation Center, there were several people who didn’t want to go. Many of them went instead to the Harris Center, avoiding a trespassing charge and connecting with some of the same resources Vankey Jones is finding now.
“We don’t want to serve them in jails, we don’t want to serve them in hospitals,” said Young. “We want to support them in the community where they live.”
People who come to the jail diversion program who have otherwise been charged with some low-level offense, often connected to homelessness such as trespassing, do so voluntarily. The average stay is just over 100 hours, according to the latest numbers. But those hours, plus whatever long-term care and help they’re able to coordinate, make a big difference. An early assessment showed that recidivism drops significantly for people who have been through the diversion program, as much as 50 percent. Even for people who have been booked into jail five or more times previously, they were more than three times less likely to be brought to jail again. For every dollar spent on the diversion program, Young is proud to say, more than $5.50 is saved in would-be criminal justice system costs.
Jones is planning her life. She wants to get back to her health care career, get back in school and become a counselor. She wants to reconnect with family and step up and help take care of her grandchildren. And for the first time in a long time, she sees a path to get there.
“That feels like a second chance to me,” she said.
More people deserve that chance. Lawmakers should make sure its community mental health centers are able to give those chances and invest in models of community care that get the results we want.