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Sheriff: Jails fail as warehouses for mentally ill

Roanoke Times - 6/5/2017

Around the time Gov. Terry McAuliffe was signing a bill aimed at protecting Virginia's mentally ill inmates, a man dubbed "John Doe, black shirt, black pants" sat silently in an isolation cell at Henrico County Jail.

For days, Doe had been refusing to speak to the jail's corrections officers and mental health workers. He had been arrested the previous weekend for allegedly stealing $22 worth of cigars and for fighting with police officers as they tried to arrest him, said Henrico County Sheriff Mike Wade, who oversees the county's jail.

"It should be easier to get these people help than what it is," Wade said last week. "Once they throw them in the jail, it's very hard to get them out."

Wade said he isn't opposed to the bill McAuliffe recently signed, which increases oversight of the state's local and regional jails, but he says it doesn't get to the root of Virginia's problem: the warehousing of people with mental illness behind bars.

The bill, which was crafted in the wake of the death of Jamycheal Mitchell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in 2015, gives a revamped Board of Corrections more oversight and provides funds to hire an investigator to review inmate deaths.

Mitchell suffered from profound mental illness. He spent about four months in jail for allegedly stealing $5 worth of snacks from a convenience store.

If Mitchell were still alive today and accused of the same crimes, Wade believes he would still wind up behind bars.

Wade said he would like to see laws passed that require speedier trials for people with low bonds for crimes like trespassing and petty theft.

"If they're putting people in jail, they shouldn't stay there longer than what they would be sentenced for," Wade said. "Nobody gets sentenced to four or five months for stealing a candy bar. Rarely do they get over a week or a day in jail for it."

Ideally, Wade said people with mental illness would be screened for mental illness before they wind up in jail and then diverted to a crisis stabilization center for help.

Del. Rob Bell, R-Charlottesville, who is vice chair of the Joint Subcommittee Studying Mental Health Services in the Commonwealth in the 21st Century, said the members of the subcommittee have been studying exactly what Wade is proposing for the past year, and he plans to dig deeper on the subject in the year to come.

"The balance, of course, is trying to identify those people more suited for a mental health approach while still preserving public safety and making sure people who run businesses and in the public deserve not to be assaulted or have properly trespassed or be stolen from," said Bell, chairman of the subcommittee's criminal justice diversion work group.

The General Assembly this year passed legislation that set aside $4.9 million to develop same-day access to mental health services at 18 of the state's 40 Community Services Boards. The measure is an initial step toward boosting and equalizing disparate services across the state.

Lawmakers hope same-day access will prevent people with mental health disorders from spiraling into crises, which may keep them out of jail.

Wade says it's too soon to know whether the steps the General Assembly took earlier this year will cut down on the number of people with mental illness who wind up in his jail.

Recently, a 70-year-old woman in a wheelchair with mental illness was taken to Henrico County Jail for the fourth time this year, he said. She had been accused of stealing from a store.

"It's easier to divert someone into the mental health system before they come to jail, but once they come to jail, it's almost impossible to get them out, or it's got to be something serious to get them out," Wade said.

In the case of Doe, the inmate without identification who was stuck in an isolation cell so he could be monitored, his mother reported him missing to the Henrico Police Department and that's when she found out he was in jail.

When she came up to the jail to see her son, Doe still wouldn't speak, Wade said. She provided information to the jail's mental health staff about his diagnosis, and they were able to get him transferred to Central State Hospital, a mental hospital in Petersburg, by the end of the day.

He was still in the hospital as of Friday, according to his mother, who asked not to be identified to protect her son's privacy. She was on her way to pack up his apartment.