Dealing with mentally ill criminals costs state heavily
By Roy Ockert Jr.
June 30, 2015
Attorneys for Dylann Roof, accused of murdering nine people on June 17 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., will at least consider a plea of insanity for their client. The case against him is rock solid, and he is a despicable young man without a defense otherwise.
What else can they do?
Setting aside the legal and scientific definitions of insanity, many of us would find it hard to believe an individual who kills people at a prayer meeting wasn’t somehow mentally ill.
Nevertheless, an insanity plea seldom works.
In an interview with National Public Radio James Alan Fox, professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeast University, explained:
“It’s very, very difficult ... to successfully plead insanity in these cases. Generally ... even if there's compelling evidence that insanity is plausible, juries certainly don’t buy it. They look at nine people killed, and they believe, not wrongly, but they do believe that someone who will get away with murder if they are found not guilty by reason of insanity. There’s nothing here that would suggest that he didn’t know what he was doing. And an insanity plea, in this case, would in all likelihood fail.”
Regardless of whether he’s mentally ill then, Roof will be convicted of murder and incarcerated somewhere for many years. Even if he gets the death penalty, we can’t seem to carry those out these days so Roof will certainly celebrate his 30th birthday and perhaps many more in prison.
He is an extreme example of our society’s attitude toward crime and mental illness. We find it much easier to lock up our “crazies” than to treat their illnesses, and it’s a more effective way to keep them from offending again.
Indeed, it’s one reason our prisons are overcrowded.
In April Bob Parker, a mental health administrator for the Arkansas Department of Correction, speaking at a conference in Fayetteville, said our state’s inmate population receiving treatment for a mental illness has more than doubled over the past five years. As of April 1, Parker said, the number of inmates on the prison’s mental health “med log” totaled 1,832. That was almost 12 percent of the prison population of 15,572.
Worse, that’s probably a small percentage of the inmates who are really mentally ill.
The Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a statewide organization that seeks to achieve social and economic justice, has commissioned a study analyzing the cost of mental health and prison reform in Arkansas, which can be viewed and downloaded at the group’s Web site (www.arpanel.org/policy.
Earlier this month Jim Metzger, an economist and president of a Little Rock consulting group, Histecon Associates Inc, which did the study, discussed its findings with members of the Behavioral Health Treatment Access Legislative Task Force. He contended that other states, including Oregon and Oklahoma, have saved considerable money by placing some mentally ill offenders in treatment centers instead of prison cells.
Of course, he wasn’t talking about someone like Dylann Roof.
But here are some of the arguments for considering a drastic change in our handling of some convicted criminals:
• A recent study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than half of all prison and jail inmates have a mental health problem, compared with 11 percent of the general population. Yet only one in three prison inmates and one in six jail inmates receive any form of mental health treatment.
• The nation’s jails and prisons have replaced hospitals as the primary facility for mentally ill individuals. A 2010 study shows there were more mentally ill individuals in the Los Angeles County jail, Chicago’s Cook County jail or New York’s Riker’s Island jail than in any psychiatric hospital in the United States.
• The same study claimed that in every county with both a county jail and a county psychiatric hospital, the jail had more seriously mentally ill individuals.
• One year’s worth of trial and jail time for each mentally ill person costs the state about 20 times as much as crisis treatment and counseling for the same person with mental problems. That could amount to as much as $150 million a year, Metzger told the panel.
The study contends that Arkansas is not upholding its constitutional mandate of caring for its citizens with a mental illness, which could result in legal challenges similar to the Lakeview educational reform case.
Arkansas has been looking for answers to the prison overcrowding problem, made worse over the past year by a new resolve get tough with probation offenders.
The study describes successful efforts made in other states to deal with mentally ill prison inmates. For most, upfront costs include establishing crisis treatment facilities.
Building and operating jails and prisons is even more expensive. The study says the Department of Correction spends $63 a day, or about $23,000 a year, to keep each inmate in prison. Further, the first-year costs of criminal processing and incarceration total about $30,000 per inmate.
The study is not as clear on the costs of establishing and operating a crisis center, which would be financed in part by Medicaid dollars. It says that, based on the experience of several other states, the average cost of treatment would be $350-400 a day — a big chunk of which would be paid by the federal government.
It also leaves open some bigger questions: How do you determine which inmates could benefit from mentally illness treatment? And how effective would treatment be in keeping those people from offending again afterward?
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.