ACJ mental health settlement poses a stiff challenge to county leadership
Aproposed settlement protecting mental health patients at the Allegheny County Jail is ambitious and sweeping — but doesn’t offer any new guidance for fixing the jail’s most enduring problem: recruiting staff.
The solution it does offer is as radical as it is common sense: If the jail can’t recruit enough staff to serve the population, then the population must decrease.
The key provisions are the result of a 2020 lawsuit alleging abysmal mental health care in the jail filed by the Abolitionist Law Center, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project and law firm Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis. The settlement would require personalized and timely consultations for those with mental health issues and multiple new training procedures across all staff in the jail. The settlement’s requirements are humane, evidence-based and show a thorough understanding of the jail’s current processes and protocols.
But without enough staff, none of it will matter.
The measure requires at least 15 new full-time equivalent mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and behavioral health rehabilitation specialists. This is an aspirational number for a facility that lacks anything close to a full staff of correctional officers or other health care providers.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of experts have grappled with ACJ’s staffing woes over the years. This includes the Jail Oversight Board, a body that has successfully brought to light several problems in the jail but has struggled to move from identifying problems to advancing solutions. Two county recruiters dedicated to finding candidates have also been unable to bring in new hires.
A report released last year found that the jail was short over 100 correctional officers, and ACJ regularly locks down portions of the facility because there are simply not enough officers to ensure safety. Without proper staff, unnecessary confinements and inadequate supervision will continue to be the norm.
So the fundamental insight of the settlement is correct: If the jail can’t properly serve its inmates, there needs to be fewer inmates. The jail has a duty to adequately care for those in its custody, many of whom haven’t yet been charged with a crime. Jail is unpleasant under the best of conditions; it becomes a horror show that achieves the opposite of its purpose — rehabilitation — when it’s shortstaffed, especially in mental health care.
The proposed consent order — which still requires a judge’s signature to become binding — gives a sixmonth deadline to achieve compliance, after which the jail will be required to redouble its recruiting and retention efforts, or immediately decrease population under the supervision of a three-judge panel. If the jail remains out of compliance for any eight-month period thereafter, a variety of county agencies will decide together how to “lawfully and voluntarily reduce the jail population.”
Given the jail’s staffing track record, it’s likely some form of “decarceration” will be triggered. The truth is there are many people in ACJ who don’t need to be there — and many who absolutely do. This settlement gives the Innamorato administration and the county judiciary six months to a year to devise an orderly system for distinguishing between these groups — all while desperately trying to staff up.
It’s a daunting challenge, and failure could be catastrophic: A chaotic decarceration program will result in a public backlash that will set back jail and criminal justice reform by years or decades. But it’s the challenge the county has chosen, and now its leaders must rise to meet it.