HOMELESS ADDICTS FINDING A LIFELINE

Joseph Gladney lost his right leg to cancer at age 14 and gave up. He
deadened the pain of his handicap with alcohol, later heroin and
finally crack cocaine.

He has spent more than 20 of his 46 years in prison, interspersed with
bouts of sleeping in abandoned cars and eating out of trash cans. Now,
although he's struggling to find permanent housing he can afford and
that will take an ex-con, his future has possibilities.

He's a few months from completing a two-year intensive treatment,
training and housing program at Fulton County's Jefferson Place. "It
will be the first thing I ever completed in my life other than a
prison sentence," says Gladney.

He's working on his GED certificate and is training for dispatch work
with a bus or taxi company. He's having a prosthetic leg made, his
first. He's been sober for 18 months and has re-established contact
with his mother and his 19-year-old daughter.

His gaze is level, his expression open as he says, "Recovery is a
lifetime thing. Jefferson Place taught me I could do it."

Jefferson Place is one of very few programs in Georgia where a
homeless addict or defendant facing jail time for a nonviolent drug-
or mental-health-related crime can go to break the cycle of
homelessness, addiction, mental illness and jail time.

A journey through Jefferson Place starts with finding a bed at the
homeless shelter with 150 other guys. If you can show you are serious
about getting clean by working around the shelter, you can join the 50
or so men in Project Focus, which includes intensive detox and
outpatient treatment for addiction.

Project Focus "consumers," as Jefferson Place residents are called,
live in the facility located in the old Fulton County jail on
Jefferson Street. If you make it through 12 weeks of treatment, you
can get on the list for the "transition" program. You get a dormitory
room, daily group therapy and 12-step meetings, a chance to go to
school or other job training, as well as life skills education ---
"I've never written a check or paid a light bill," says Gladney.

When you get close to finishing the two-year stint, your case manager
will help you find housing and a job. The "after-care" program wraps
around you for the first three months, helping with rent and other
support as you get established on your own.

Who else provides this kind of "soup to nuts" help for homeless
addicts, many of whom also have mental illness?

"Nobody," project director Gerry Richardson says, with a rueful grin.
There are outpatient clinics, there are shelters, there are detox
units and a smattering of job-training programs. Few facilities offer
all in the same place.

Research shows, however, that this kind of long-term supportive
treatment and housing is cheaper and dramatically more effective at
permanently breaking the cycle of chronic homelessness and jail than
fragmented services can be. A 2002 evaluation of the California
Community Mental Health Treatment program, which like Jefferson Place
combines supportive housing with mental health services, medications,
substance abuse and job training, reported the following impact on the
4,720 people who participated over a year's time:

66 percent decline in hospitalization

82 percent decline in incarceration

79 percent decline in homelessness

169 percent increase in employment

$23 million savings to the state.

There may be as many as 85,000 homeless people in Georgia with a
mental illness, an addiction or both. For the few thousand who have
been on the streets a year or more, the only medical care is in
emergency rooms. The most likely institutional contact they have is at
the local county jail, with the occasional stay at a mental hospital
if they become psychotic.

Theirs is an expensive lifestyle, at least for the taxpayer. A stay in
the overcrowded Fulton County jail --- where 700 or more mentally ill
inmates are housed routinely --- costs at least $45 a day, more if
medical care is required. A night at Grady Memorial Hospital's
psychiatric unit costs taxpayers $630.

By contrast, Jefferson Place --- which operates with a combination of
federal grants and county matching funds --- spends about $35 a day
for each man in transitional housing.

But Jefferson Place's program is available to only 50 men a year.
Richardson says he could double the size of the program in the old
jail facility if he had the construction money to rehab the second
floor. Fulton County has no plans to allocate that money, however.

Jefferson Place works. Its focused, comprehensive program produces
results, both for its clients and for taxpayers, and it should be
duplicated all over metro Atlanta and the state.

Editor's note: This is the second in an occasional series about how
the lack of mental health and addiction treatment contributes to
homelessness, jail overcrowding and budget problems.