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New Hampshire House committee supports ban on sending mentally ill to prison

Portsmouth Herald - 10/25/2016

CONCORD – A State House committee recommended a ban on housing mentally ill patients with no criminal record in the New Hampshire State Prison alongside convicted criminals last week.

The House Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs Committee voted 17-1 last Thursday to recommend future legislation seeking to make the ban. Currently, people deemed too dangerous to be kept in New Hampshire Hospital, the state’s acute care psychiatric hospital in Concord, can be sent to the Secured Psychiatric Unit (SPU) in the state prison if the hospital does not have the means to deal with their violent behavior. There, they are mixed with convicted criminals serving time, people found not guilty by reason of insanity and sexually violent predators.

The committee took the vote after it studied a bill filed last year by state Rep. Renny Cushing, D-Hampton, that sought to instate the ban. Cushing, an advocate for victims and those with mental health problems, said he intends to file a new bill next year if he is re-elected to represent Rockingham District 21 this November.

Cushing said the vote by the committee is a strong step forward towards passing that bill into law. Nashua state Rep. Don Lebrun was the lone vote against the motion. The vote came after a Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs subcommittee voted 5-1 in September to not recommend the passage of such a bill. In the full committee vote, Cushing said Reps. Tom Sherman, D-Rye, and Pam Gordon, D-Portsmouth, were among those who helped sway the committee to the nearly unanimous decision last week.

“I think it adds momentum,” Cushing said. “I think what’s happened is for the first time in 30 years the Legislature has before it both a challenge and the opportunity to change its policy, then can end the shame of being (one of the only states) that takes people who have never committed a crime with mental illness and put them in prison.”

Before the committee voted last week, it received letters from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Legal Assistants, the National Association of Mental Illness and the Disabilities Rights Center asking the lawmakers to recommend the change. Cushing believes those letters were also key factors that persuaded the committee to make the recommendation.

New Hampshire Hospital transferred 51 people to the SPU between 2012 and 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Fifty were on an emergency basis. The state hospital transfers an average of 13 people to the SPU each year, the average length of stay not being known, according to DHHS.

Cushing has drafted the bill he plans to submit in his next term or have submitted by another lawmaker if he is not re-elected. The bill would instate the ban effective July 1, 2019, giving the state two years to stop transferring patients to the SPU. It would also direct an oversight committee to help plan and carry out the creation of a new facility that will be able to treat people outside the prison.

State officials have said that the SPU is an adequate place for the mentally ill and that patients receive the same care they would at New Hampshire Hospital. Advocates have still been vocal about their belief that the practice is wrong, though. Cushing filed a grievance this summer complaining of the practice with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Right Division, along with co-signers from the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center and the New Hampshire branch of the American Friends Service Committee.

“Sending people that are mentally ill (without criminal records) to prison, no way Jose does that sound like best medical practice,” Cushing said.