Last week, I was in working in the medical unit. There are a trio of inmates in this unit who are seriously mentally ill. They see things that aren’t there, they talk to people who don’t exist, and some poop on the walls. It’s interesting, but not the most fun.

It’s inmates like these that I mostly feel sorry for though. Being locked up in a cell only makes their symptoms worse. Most are picked up because they stopped taking their medications. Since they come in with little to none of their medication in their system anymore, their ability to say yes to medications from us is severely hampered. Most mentally ill inmates refuse to take any medications once they enter our doors.

This fact causes them to downward spiral into a total loss of reality. There are times when they come back from the secret places of their mind and become lucid, but those glimpses are few and far between. Most of the time they just scream and pound on the walls and doors.

If they get too out of control, looking like they could hurt themselves, we have to take action. Usually, this action takes the form of placing them into the restraint chair, but often just getting them to comply enough to place them in the restraint chair forces us to use OC spray, or even the TASER. It makes me sad to use force on a mentally ill inmate, but if the alternative is them hurting them self, then I do it.

I’m not known as a “hug a thug” officer, who thinks the world could be a utopia if only there were programs for every inmate, but these kinds of people do not belong in jail. There has to be a better way.

I don’t know what the answer is, but warehousing mentally ill inmates in jail just doesn’t work. It’s costly, it doesn’t solve the problem, and the inmate usually re-offends in short order.

I know that other counties have enacted a “Mental Health Court”, which is like our county’s “Drug Court”. Our drug court makes offenders accountable to the court and allows them the chance to get their lives back on track, minus the drug lifestyle.

A mental health court could do the same kind of thing, but with the mentally ill offender. It would ensure they were taking their medications, and that they were taking care of their obligations. I don’t know the full details of what other counties do, but I would imagine that it’s probably better than simply locking them up all the time.

The problem, is that our Drug Court is woefully underfunded, and has had to seriously think about closing it’s doors more than a few times since I started working at the jail, so it’s hard to envision another court starting up to take care of yet another slice of our population.

If there is a better way, then we should be looking at it. One of my mantras at work, is to “Work smarter, not harder”.

Of all the officer assitance calls that I hear, I would venture to guess that 75% are directly related to a mentally ill inmate.

We aren’t working with the mentally ill population very smart, but we sure are working hard.