Editorial: Limit jail stays, add beds for mentally ill

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Anyone who doubts the severe consequences of years of budget cuts to the state’s mental health system might want to visit their nearest county jail.

Chances are, he or she will find at least one or two inmates awaiting transfer to a state psychiatric facility because they were deemed mentally unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity.

The average wait in a county jail for these inmates is one to two months and sometimes more than three months, according to the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association.

That may not seem like a long time. But confining mentally ill people to jails that lack the resources to treat them for any length of time is anything but therapeutic and only increases the likelihood of suicide or attempted suicide.

Jails have become de facto holding centers for the mentally ill in Illinois because of a shortage of beds at psychiatric facilities operated by the state Department of Human Services. The state has 593 beds for people deemed unfit to stand trial, and at any given time, an additional 80 inmates are waiting to fill them.

The growing demand for these beds appears to be driven by an increase in the number of people with untreated mental illness who are coming into contact with the criminal justice system.

That’s hardly surprising, given significant reductions in funding for community-based mental health services in Illinois over the past several years.

With nowhere else to go, it’s inevitable that people with untreated depression, schizophrenia and other illnesses will find themselves in crisis settings, such as hospital emergency rooms, homeless shelters and jails.

In fact, a report last year by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center found that a seriously mentally ill person in the United States is three times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized.

County sheriffs frustrated by the backlog in transfers to state mental facilities are pushing a bill in the Illinois House that would set a 20-day limit on how long an inmate deemed unfit to stand trial can remain in a county jail.

After that time, the sheriff would have the authority to transfer the inmate to the nearest state mental health facility.

That would ease the burden on correctional facilities, but it would do nothing to tackle the larger issue of too few treatment resources for the mentally ill. In the long term, the state must find ways to pay for more beds — and the additional services that would necessitate — at its psychiatric facilities. Hiring the staff needed to add about 70 beds at two mental health centers would cost about $4 million a year.

Illinois’ massive budget deficit won’t make that easy, and we are reluctant to urge the state to spend more money on anything at a time when cuts in overall spending are essential. We could, but do not, write an editorial every day lamenting budget cuts to one worthy program or another — everybody’s got a legitimate hard-luck story.

But if there’s a lesson to be learned from the mentally ill inmates now being held in limbo in increasing numbers in expensive county jails, it’s that cutting corners on vital services now will only cost us more down the road.