The National Stepping Up Summit held its first conference to address the staggering number of American inmates who suffer from mental illness. Hosted by The Council of State Governments Justice Center, the National Association of Counties and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the summit sought to help policymakers and others seek mental health testing and treatment for lawbreakers, rather than sending offenders into jails.
Dr. Saul Levin, CEO and medical director at APA, said the 450 mental health professionals, law enforcement agents, community leaders, and attorneys on hand, journeyed from 50 jurisdictions and 37 states in the spirit of collaboration.
“We have a chance to begin to bend the curve down of admissions to jails and prisons and create a prevention, early intervention, treatment and recovery system of care that will help people who live with mental illness of not being further stigmatized and incarcerated,” Levin said at the summit. “They have the opportunity to receive the care they need and deserve. From a country like ours that is so blessed with resources, they simply need to be realigned.”
Launched in May 2015, Stepping Up found that more than two million Americans with mental illness are housed in prison, receiving few, if any health services. The results include overtaxed law enforcement and prison systems, high recidivism, and a national epidemic of untreated emotional problems.
“Repairing the criminalization of people with mental illness is a multifaceted issue that places the same individuals that would be in state hospitals in prisons,” Dr. Renee Binder, president of the APA told the standing-room only crowd. “The care in prisons and jails is often very poor and people with mental illness stay incarcerated longer than those with comparable sentences because they just don’t know the rules and are victimized.”
A 2015 report conducted by a Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center estimated that people with mental illness are 16 times more likely than others to be killed by police and that roughly one in four fatal police encounters involve someone with mental illness. Those encounters overwhelmingly include Blacks.
“Cases are common and though training has improved, police officers do not know how to spot mental illness, leading to confrontations and a felony charge. Those are the folks we are trying to reach,” Sallie Clark, president at the Association of Counties said. “Reducing mental illness in jails is a top priority, but how do we deal with people who do not need to be jailed, but need some type of intervention? Things happen in jails that are not good things and our deputies are not trained to deal with mental health issues.”
Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey told summit attendees that within the 48 local police departments and 281 criminal courts under her jurisdiction it was imperative to address the mental health issues contributing to crime in order to prevent it.
“It is interesting to have a district attorney who says let people out of jail who may be sick despite them having the highest recidivism rates of those arrested and it hasn’t been an easy sell within my own ranks,” she said. “Jail is not the right answer for these issues and I had to go into communities and talk about the how this practice was simply inhumane. It is inhumane because, without treatment, all you are doing is perpetuating the problem without ever really helping the person.”