Bartholomew County Jail Commander Maj. John Martoccia had a matter-of-fact reply when asked how a full-time mental health professional was working out at the jail.
“He’s become a very busy man these days,” the jail commander said.
That’s not surprising, because as a society, we’ve pretty much relegated many people who are experiencing a mental health crisis to our emergency medical technicians and law enforcement officers. While these first responders may have specialized training that’s vital in an emergency, they usually are not qualified mental health professionals.
People in mental health crisis often end up in jail. In some places, nearly half of the jail population is comprised of people who have been diagnosed with mental illness.
According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Prison Policy Initiative, more than 44 percent of people in local jails nationwide have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Applied to the Bartholomew County Jail’s recent average population of 240, that figure would translate to roughly 105 of them having been so diagnosed.
Given the clear need for mental health treatment among those behind bars, Bartholomew County Commissioners took a good first step recently in amending a contract with Nashville, Tennessee-based Advanced Correctional Healthcare that provides jail inmates with access to a mental health professional working 40 hours a week.
As The Republic’s Mark Webber reported, while the company has been providing medical and mental health services at the jail, they did not have the ability to bill the county until the three commissioners signed off on the amendment. The action formalizes a decision made by the Bartholomew County Council last August, which came just a few months after the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute provided a $187,000 grant to the Bartholomew County Jail.
“We know that there are too many people suffering from serious mental illness that end up in the justice system, and many county jails are not equipped to provide them the treatment that they need,” said Indiana Department of Mental Health and Addiction Director Jay Chaudhary. This goes for a range of services from substance abuse treatment to counseling to accessing prescribed medications.
The county previously had a $95,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to provide mental health services at the jail.
The amendment the commissioners signed was something of a formality, but it also presents the opportunity to affirm the jail’s duty to care for those it houses who have a mental illness. Regardless of the source of funding, there is no alternative when we know the extent of mental illness among jail populations.
In Marion County, the new jail was designed with this realization. Mental health is at the forefront. Every person who is booked is first given a mental health assessment to determine risk, placement, treatment needs, possible services and more.
Of course, Bartholomew County is not Marion County, but people are people. Just as we would expect someone with a chronic health condition behind bars to have access to medical care, we should have the reasonable expectation that someone who is in crisis behind bars due to mental illness will have access to professional mental health care.
