Mayor Michael Bloomberg has started an important new corrections initiative focused on mentally ill offenders, who make up about a third of the city's jail population and are more likely than other prisoners to resume criminal behavior once they are freed. The aim is to give the courts up-to-date information about a defendant's record and mental health status so that a judge can decide whether the defendant should be sent to a treatment program instead of jail.
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The initiative emerged from a recent study of mentally ill inmates by the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a research and policy group. Among other things, it found that the mentally ill who enter the corrections system were an increasingly expensive problem in the city — costing three times as much as inmates without mental disabilities — and that their numbers were growing, even as the jail population as a whole was declining. In 2011, they made up 33 percent of the average daily jail population, as opposed to 24 percent in 2005.
Mentally ill inmates also stay in jail nearly twice as long as people without mental illness, an average of 112 days compared with 61 days. One of the problems is that the mentally ill are less likely to make bail because they have less money and fewer family members or friends who are willing to get them out.
In many other large urban centers, judges are able to make decisions about bail and community-based treatment because they have ready access to data showing the defendant's mental health history and risk. Mr. Bloomberg hopes to bring such a system to New York by creating centralized teams that quickly collect the information and relay it to the courts. These teams will also connect mentally ill defendants to appropriate community-based services. They will then inform the courts about the defendant's progress.
This represents an important first step. But the city will have to make strides in other areas as well. For example, it needs to ensure that mentally ill people who receive drugs and treatment through the Medicaid program do not fall off the welfare rolls for bureaucratic reasons. This increases the risk that they will behave in ways that land them in trouble.
In addition, mentally ill people who lose eligibility for Medicaid or federal disability benefits because they have been jailed must be re-enrolled in those programs before they are released and provided with enough medication to tide them over until they are established in treatment. Left to their own devices, they frequently "self medicate" — with illicit drugs or alcohol — which, of course, makes them vulnerable to being picked up again and taken back to jail.
The city should also revisit its "quality of life" policing strategy, under which people who commit minor offenses are deliberately hauled off the streets to jail. In an ideal system, the mentally ill who commit minor offenses and present no real danger to the public would never see the inside of a jail but would instead be referred directly to treatment.
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