Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net/David Castillo Dominici
Of the ten thousand inmates at Cook County Jail, at any given time, at least 3,000 of those individuals suffer from a mental illness. Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart, sat down with WGN news to discuss the ever-pressing issue of mentally ill inmates. The Sheriff said Cook County Jail is the largest mental health provider in the state, and maybe the nation.
The crisis is coming to a head, and something needs to be done now.
Sheriff Dart, a history major, is responsible for overseeing the mental health care at the Cook County Jail and, as noted by Rick Pearson of WGN’s Sunday Spin, he is the “leader in providing mental health care to Chicagoans.” Something is wrong with this picture.
Within the last several years, society has increasingly accepted mental illness as a serious, debilitating condition affecting thousands in Cook County, but those suffering from incapacitating mental illness struggle the most with finding medical assistance. Sheriff Dart argued that with the closure of clinics citywide, inmates have nowhere to go. They can’t make it to the next clinic because of transportation woes, money problems, etc. As a result, the Cook County Jail has become a leading provider in mental health services because these individuals who, more often than not, are homeless and jobless, commit non-violent petty crimes landing them in jail.
Correctional officers at the jail are given advanced mental health training in order to provide the inmates with the best care possible. This comes at a cost: it is three times more expensive to take care of the mentally ill in jail. This problem is not limited to Cook County or Illinois. Overall, the number of mentally ill inmates has steadily risen since the closing of mental health institutions in the 1970s.
Untreated mental health issues can masquerade as criminal behavior. We have had clients charged with various misdemeanor and/or drug type offenses whose cases stemmed from deeper untreated mental health diagnosis. In this economy, for a person with a mental health disease who may have lost their job and insurance, access to their stabilizing medication is often the first thing to go. This can lead to decompensation or self-medicating with illegal substances, which can lead to being arrested and charged with a crime. These types of cases an clients are some of the most challenging to handle because the criminal practitioner must become a multifaceted problem solver; including having familiarity and contacts with low cost or free mental health programs, and be open to not only acting as your client’s attorney but basically as a coordinator of services and programs that you may be able to get your client into and increase your chances of convincing a judge to give your client probation or some type of alternative sentence to prison time.
If you or a close friend or family member is suffering from a situation similar to that described above, give us a call at Laura Law.
