(Mar. 3, 2016) Victor Ford and Dennis Gross will remain in jail while the Wyoming State Hospital works to find a hospital bed for them, a judge ruled last week (“Mental illness woes see no end,” Jackson Hole News & Guide, Mar. 2).
The two men will remain locked in limbo waiting for bed space to open up, in what has unfortunately become a common dilemma state- and nationwide.
Ford has been waiting for a month and Gross for four months. They cannot progress through the legal system until a qualified evaluator determines whether their mental illnesses interfere with their ability to continue.
“I just do not have a bed, and I don’t know what to do,” said Department of Health Director Tom Forslund. “We have a serious situation.”
Authorities said that longer jail stays due to a lack of hospital beds for inmates who need court-ordered evaluations has been a problem in the state for years and that they see no relief in sight.
Wyoming has just 20.4 public psych beds per 100,000 people – far below the minimum of 50 considered necessary to provide minimally adequate treatment for individuals with severe mental illness.
There are currently four inpatient facilities in Wyoming with full psychiatric wards.
When these facilities are full, Teton County is one of several counties with no choice but to keep mentally ill defendants behind bars – a practice which is cruel and inhumane.
Teton County Sheriff Jim Whalen, who prompted the recent hearings in an effort to spur the state hospital to action, said he was fed up with using the jail as a stopgap measure.
“What I fear is also the future,” Whalen said. “This seems like a good time to figure this thing out. It’s a sad commentary on the situation we are all in that I felt compelled to take the action I did. It’s just not acceptable for us or for these men.”
Ford and Gross are expected to be transferred to a state hospital this month, after what state officials described as “bending over backward” to decrease their wait times.
But they are far from the first to see delays due to long waits for state hospital beds.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed numerous recent lawsuits against other states, including California and Pennsylvania, for long wait times. Wyoming may be next.
Read the Treatment Advocacy Center report “No Room at the Inn” to learn more about how the continuous emptying of state psychiatric hospitals for the past half century has decimated the number of public psychiatric beds available for the treatment of acutely or chronically ill psychiatric patients in the United States.
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