Veteran's father fights for more treatment, less jail for mentally ill

Jim Brann's son, Billy, has been in and out of jails in southern Kansas since he returned from his second tour of Iraq in 2008.

Brann, an Overland Park retiree and military veteran himself, says his son would benefit from treatment for his bipolar condition and the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered after seeing heavy combat.

The state would benefit too, Brann says, and that is why he has been speaking to legislators for months about developing sentencing options that would allow judges to mandate treatment rather than prison time for Kansans with mental illness who commit minor crimes.

“The last place in the world those people need to be is incarcerated," Brann said. "And the last people who want to take care of mentally ill people is the corrections system.”

In Kansas, 38 percent of those incarcerated have a diagnosed mental illness, and the expense of treatment in that setting is one that Kansas Department of Corrections secretary Ray Roberts has repeatedly asked legislators to consider when forming the agency's budget.

“As Sec. Ray Roberts often says, we are the largest mental health care provider in the state of Kansas, meaning the Department of Corrections,” said Rep. John Rubin, R-Shawnee.

Rubin, the chairman of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, is one of the legislators with whom Brann has spoken.

Rubin said he would have to see what form potential legislation would take, but the principle of finding alternatives to incarceration for Kansans with mental illness who don't pose a threat to the community is one he supports.

“It is an issue that we will look at, if I’m fortunate to be re-elected and come back and be chosen chairman of corrections again,” Rubin said.

Rubin said it is also an issue that may be looked at by a joint House and Senate corrections committee that meets before the next legislative session in January.

With Kansas prisons at or near capacity, Rubin said incarceration alternatives have been a focus for legislators, though always with public safety first in mind.

He pointed to the 2013 Justice Reinvestment Act and a bill passed last year allowing treatment-oriented sentences for military veterans with combat related-PTSD as examples.

The latter, House Bill 2655, pertains only to veterans who received an honorable discharge, which disqualifies Brann's son.

Brann said his son was discharged for bad conduct after smuggling drugs into Iraq for his second tour and then stealing morphine from a medical corpsman.

But Brann said he believes those transgressions can be traced directly to his son's mental condition.

“People that are mentally ill, they treat themselves, they self-medicate, and that's what my son did," Brann said. "He went to combat in 2005 and was at Fallujah and Ramadi, the worst of the worst, as a Marine. When he came back he started self-medicating and then when he went back for a second tour, that's when he got in trouble.”

Brann is developing draft legislation that would allow judges to order treatment for Kansans with mental illness convicted of crimes that fall outside the presumed prison time section of the sentencing grid. If the crime falls within the presumed prison sentencing grid and the offender is ordered to serve time, the bill would require that the defendant receive "appropriate therapeutic mental illness care," including counseling and prescription medications.

“When somebody goes to prison and they’ve got diabetes and need insulin or they have a heart condition, we give them that medication," Brann said. "We need the same thing for mental illness."