(June 8, 2016) Inmates suffering with severe mental illness in California’s Sonoma County Jail are especially affected by the national psychiatric bed shortage, jail officials said last week (“Decline in psychiatric hospital beds concerns Sonoma County Jail officials,” the Press Democrat, June 5).
In the past five years, 20 percent of the nation’s state hospital beds for the country’s most severely ill psychiatric patients have disappeared, and local jails are increasingly picking up the slack.
“We’re seeing that the situation regarding state hospital beds has reached an unimaginable crisis,” said Treatment Advocacy Center Executive Director John Snook. “We’re now seeing far fewer beds than would even be considered the bare minimum.”
Specifically, California maintains just 15 public psychiatric beds per 100,000 people – not nearly enough to provide minimally adequate treatment for the most severely ill.
The psychiatric bed crisis has resulted in Sonoma County jail inmates with severe mental illness being forced to wait many months to be transferred to a state hospital for appropriate mental health treatment.
“It takes anywhere from six to eight months to get them into a state hospital bed,” said Michael Kennedy, director of Sonoma County’s mental health department. “That has a huge impact on folks that need to get out of jails to get into a state hospital.”
Interestingly, Sonoma County Jail was granted $40 million last year for the construction of a new mental health unit.
While it is certainly understandable that those working in corrections want to find solutions for the human suffering they see in their jails, creating mental health units in a jail is a poor substitute for a state committing the necessary resources to see treatment delivered where it should be delivered: in hospitals, staffed by medical professionals.
Rather than changing how they deal with people in jail whose mental illness has been criminalized, states have a responsibility to get treatment to their citizens before they go to jail – or at least to get them out of jail and into the hospital in a reasonable amount of time.
That means better treatment systems and more beds.
Read our 2016 report, “Going, Going Gone,” to learn more about the trends and consequences of eliminating state psychiatric beds.
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