Mary Neal's Sharebook 

Featured below is an article that sets forth the reasons why Ohio mentally ill inmates are suing the Ohio prison system.  Mentally ill people and their families are coming to recognize that they are being set up to continue revolving in and out of prisons in order to benefit prison investors.  We already have the solution to homelessness, prison and death for America's middle-class and indigent mentally ill citizens.  The article underscores the need to pass H.R.619, a bill by Rep. Eddie Johnson (D-TX) to resume Medicaid funding for inpatient psychiatric hospitalization.  Prisons should be replaced with hospitals for acute mental patients in crisis, and mandated participation in Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs is needed after hospital or prison release.  To ilustrate how discriminated against mentally ill Americans are, below is a tweet I was prevented from posting to Twitter last night regarding my schizophrenic brother's Secret arrest and Murder in Memphis Shelby County Jail and the refusal by the United States Department of Justice to answer our Freedom of Information Act request which is published on the web at http://bit.ly/9K459N  to release documents related to his arrest and death and investigate the crime:

If AfAm sick ppl don't have the rights of pit bulls around here, don't hide it. Just come right out and say so. I am. http://bit.ly/9K459N  

What happens to ex-inmates with mental illness?
Saturday, March 6, 2010
By Tracey Read
TRead@News-Herald.com

State prisoners with mental illness return to Ohio communities with just two weeks’ worth of medications, $65 and a bus ticket.

Without links to proper follow-up care, they often end up in homeless shelters or other unstable situations.

Now, a federal lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court seeks to require the state prison system to pre-enroll prisoners with serious mental illness to mental health treatment, housing and other resources to keep them from returning to the criminal justice system.

Lake County Sheriff Daniel A. Dunlap agreed the state needs to do more to help ex-prisoners re-enter society.

“Fifteen out of every 100 people who come in our jail have some mental health issue,” Dunlap said. “Of that 15 percent, 4 or 5 percent in my estimation have extreme mental health issues.

“The state is in financial trouble. So what do they do? They close two mental health hospitals, and there wasn’t

enough to begin with. It just puts us

with more homeless and more people in jail.”

The lawsuit was filed last month by the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice and Policy Center on behalf of nine plaintiffs who suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

According to the suit, none of the ex-prisoners received effective assistance filling out applications for Social Security benefits, Medicaid or food stamps.

They also got no help obtaining housing, weren’t linked up with mental health service providers or caseworkers and were only given short supplies of medication.

All have lengthy criminal records.

One person named in the suit was homeless and not medicated when he was re-arrested for threatening people at a Cincinnati agency just three weeks after leaving prison.

Of people from Lake or Geauga counties who were released from prison in 2005, more than a third of them (35 percent) returned to state prisons by 2008, said Eli Braun, mental health advocate for the Justice and Policy Center.

“That doesn’t count people who were re-arrested but only served time in jail,” Braun added. “This lawsuit hopes to make a dent in that recidivism rate by helping former prisoners continue their needed mental health care in the community. People with mental illness often return to prison for mostly nonviolent crimes that are really just symptoms of untreated mental illness.”

It costs $7,400 a year to treat someone with mental illness in the community, vs. $25,000 a year to send the same person back to prison, according to the Ohio Association of Behavioral Health Authorities.

Dunlap said Lake County is fortunate because a Mental Health Court run by Mentor Municipal Court Judge John Trebets helps 28 people at a time break the cycle of offending.

“Those in the program have an 80 percent chance of success,” the sheriff said.

Trebets said the goal of his Mental Health Court is to keep people from being institutionalized.

“My job is to make sure they’re following through and doing the things they should be doing,” he said.

Julie Hammond, treatment manager for the county’s Mental Health Court, said most — if not all — state mental health boards already have some type of program linking each mentally ill inmate with an agency for help before the person even leaves a city jail.

“The problem sometimes is that people don’t follow through when they get out,” she said.

Judy Burr, executive director with Project Hope for the Homeless shelter, said her organization also has aftercare services for mentally ill offenders who wind up at the Painesville Township facility. But it’s not always enough.

“When they come out, they really are given just what they came in with,” Burr said. “That’s not a black eye on our jails. There needs to be something else like us to get them back in (to society). But the whole system is just so overwhelmed right now. We’re overwhelmed right now. We have many people we have to turn away because of space.”

Geauga County Sheriff Dan McClelland said his employees always work closely with mental health organizations the entire time inmates with psychological disabilities are in jail to prepare them for life on the outside.

“We see varying degrees of mental health issues that can be camouflaged by drug dependency,” McClelland said. “You can probably make the argument that anyone who commits a crime is mentally ill. We work with the inmates so the chances of them being successful enough to re-enter society is much higher. We don’t just open the door and turn them out.”
URL: http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2010/03/06/news/doc4b91608c6f145250715745.prt

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America's decision to "de-institutionalize" mental illness in the 1960's and 70's without instituting Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs to mandate continuous psychiatric care and provide subsistence assistance to acute patients was a mistake that society continues to pay for having made.  Just as no adequate provisions were made for hundreds of thousands of sick people who were released from mental hospitals decades ago, little or no provisions are made for mentally ill ex-offenders.  This is true despite the fact that successful re-entry into society is a success for the entire social structure.  Avoiding recidivism means avoiding crimes that lead to re-arrest and releif from America's stiffling prison budget.  People who do not care to replace prison terms with hospitalization in psychiatric treatment facilities for acute mental patients in crisis and institute Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) programs for mentally ill inmates upon prison release for humanitarian reasons may reconsider when they contemplate the fact that released offenders shop at the same malls as our children.  AOT programs provide mental patients released from hospitals and prisons monitoring, psychiatric care, and subsistence assistance at a cost that is significantly less than future imprisonment, which oftentimes follows avoidable tragedies. 

Be aware that over 90% of inmates have a release date in their files.  People who do not care to improve rehabilitation programs in prisons and eliminate torture for humanitarian reasons may want to do so when they acknowledge that released inmates live in the same communities that we all do.  Many inmates who walk into prisons perfectly sane are subjected to such cruelty and solitary confinement torture, that they, too, are mentally ill when they emerge from "correctional" facilities.

Numerous organizations advocate the need for change in how mental illness is treated in America, including Treatment Advocacy Center, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, The Carter Center, Mental Health America, and others.  NAMI formally declared its support for passage of H.R.619 in January.  See the letter from the national headquarters of NAMI in this Sharebook.  Please come aboard the movement to decriminalize mental illness in America.  Pledge your support for passage of H.R. 619 and help the least of these, His brethren: naked, sick, imprisoned mental patients (Matt. 25:40) like my brother Larry Neal was before he was murdered for being "unacceptably different."

Mary Neal
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.Care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI