A Psychotropic Population

Figuring out how to handle mentally ill population in county jails in Land of Enchantment

Roughly one-third of inmates in county detention facilities across New Mexico have been identified as mentally ill, as they serve lengthy periods of incarceration that cost the taxpayers millions of dollars every year.

An 18-member task force is now calling on state legislators to solve the problem by creating interim facilities that would be better equipped to supervise and treat prisoners while they await official charges, in a process that is often complicated by competency hearings.

With about a month to go until the Legislature meets for a 30-day session, the task force presented its 24-page report to the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee in a two-hour, sometimes spirited discussion that shed light on a jail network overrun and overburdened by a burgeoning population taking psychotropic meds—some 2,500 strong on any given day.

Each year, taxpayers bankroll the $28 million it takes to house the mentally ill inmates who've been charged with various crimes; they often wait between 6 and 18 months in an already overtaxed legal system while preliminary hearings, plea deals and trials go on.

Charged with a host of crimes that range from drug possession to property damage to burglary to violent outbursts on the street, the inmates  sit inside cell blocks or fill what few beds there are in the ill-equipped psychiatric units, with critics arguing that the jails have become a "de facto form of housing" in the absence of mental hospitals.

Grace Philips, who chairs the Senate Joint Memorial 4 Task Force and is general counsel for the New Mexico Association of Counties, says the unchecked numbers are beginning to take their toll in the 26 county jails, whose general population is just a tad greater than the total number of inmates serving time in the state prisons.

"It's a tough call on what to do with all the mentally ill," Philips tells SFR last week. "How it's going to be solved, we're not exactly sure."

Compounding the problem, according to the findings, are the limited number of psychiatric wards in the state, with the state hospital, the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, taking care of only 80 individuals in its adult psychiatric unit and another 50 in its forensic unit. In all, there are fewer than 500 psychiatric beds in the 14 hospitals statewide, according to the report.

While the county detention administrations, Philips says, are doing the best they can with the resources they have, unfortunately it's not enough, nor are lengthy incarcerations the answer.

The debate proved a lively one last week, featuring Hank Hughes, the executive director of the New Mexican Coalition to End Homelessness, and Angela Pacheco, the district attorney for the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe.

Pacheco offered personal accounts of the quandary surrounding such incarcerations: Parents have called local cops to have their children arrested from time to time, so that they go to jail and will be forced to take their medications, a perfect example, perhaps, of how the jails have become hospitals in their administration of psychotropic drugs.

In one case, Pacheco said she even took it upon herself to tend to one young man at the request of the family, in a last-ditch effort that underscores the lack of proper services and health care for those who've allegedly committed a crime and have been charged but whose ulterior motives are questioned due to their psychological instability.

Sen. Cisco McSorely, a Democrat whose District 16 includes part of Bernalillo County, suggested that the state try to substitute the $28 million being spent to currently house them by putting that money toward either one or several treatment facilities. McSorely's approach wouldn't necessarily require construction of a new facility; it would tap into the resources that are available in the community.

But such a move is easier said than done and could require a change in state law that would allow for the transfer from county jails to treatment facilities. As Sen. Bill B O'Neill, D-Bernalillo, pointed out, some of the inmates have been charged with violent crimes and are just as capable of harming others on the outside as much as themselves, which raised the question as to what constitutes a secure and therapeutic facility.

Meanwhile, as the solutions are being bandied about,  Philips will now convene task force members and try to come up with an exact number on how much is needed in a feasibility study, which this bicameral committee will then take before the Legislature. Philips says it is doubtful that it would make the governor's agenda for the upcoming session.

But she says she's hoping that the problem can be dealt with, either administratively or from  a budget standpoint, in what she referred to as "some sort of tweaking."

"Whatever the outcome, we're hoping there will be some relief," she says.


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