Mentally ill remain stalled in Pa. jails

Witold Walczak, in a press release. “These are very sick people who need health care, and courts have been clear that they cannot remain in jail.”

The ACLU is demanding the state cut the maximum wait times to seven days, submit to an independent consultant’s analysis of the hospitals’ forensic patients and the inmates awaiting transfer, and open 100 new treatment beds within six months.

In response to questions, a Department of Human Services spokeswoman wrote that the state has spent $17.6 million on 149 new “community based slots” for people in the forensic mental health system, diverted 340 people from the hospitals’ waiting lists to other settings, converted 60 hospital beds from civil patients to criminal cases, hired an efficiency consultant and launched a data-driven search for solutions.

When defendants are not competent to understand the charges against them or to help their defense lawyers, they must get competency treatment, which the state provides at Torrance in Derry and Norristown in Montgomery County.

In 2015, the ACLU sued on behalf of around a dozen inmates, alleging that many defendants awaiting competency treatment sit in solitary confinement in jails for months on end because of slow turnover at the hospitals. Some inmates have died while awaiting transfer, according to the lawsuit. At the time, there were around 237 forensic beds in thetwo hospitals.