TO BREAK JAIL CYCLE, TREAT MENTAL ILLNESS

The woman stood before the judge, wearing an airport security guard's
uniform. Yes, she promised, she was still taking her medication. Then she
pumped her fist in the air and said, "I'm making twenty-six-seven."

Everyone in the courtroom, including the prosecutor who had originally
pressed a simple battery charge against the woman, cheered along with her.

The scene played out before Fulton Magistrate Judge Kimberly Warden in a
new, experimental "diversion court," where defendants who need mental
health or substance-abuse treatment can choose that route rather than jail.
"Discharge managers" --- trained clinicians from the Fulton County Mental
Health Division --- help to arrange treatment and housing and establish
contact with families and services. The aim is to keep the individual
anchored in society and as self-sufficient as possible.

Six months ago, this young woman would have sat for six weeks or longer in
the Fulton County Jail, waiting for an evaluation from Grady Memorial
Hospital to confirm a mental illness she already knew she had, at a cost to
taxpayers of $45 a day. She also would have lost her home and job in the
process.

Thanks to diversion court, though, she has kept that job, making $26,700
and paying taxes. Now she appears before the court every few weeks to
confirm she's still taking her medicine. Soon the charges will be dismissed.

The diversion court system, in other words, serves the taxpayer, serves
society, serves the mentally ill and serves justice. It keeps people out of
the spiral of arrest, jail, homelessness and hopelessness that has
overcrowded county jails and state prisons. But, like most programs that
deal effectively with these issues, it is too small to do enough.

Consider these figures:

Georgia's bursting-at-the-seams state prison system costs taxpayers $1
billion a year to house, feed and guard more than 50,000 inmates. The state
spends almost exactly that amount to address the mental health and
addiction problems of more than 170,000 Georgians and doesn't come near to
meeting the need. More than 320,000 Georgians are mentally ill, according
to federal figures.

Fulton County spends more than $50 million to run its jail with close to
3,000 inmates but only about $17 million on mental health and drug and
alcohol treatment for the whole county. On any given day, as many as 700
inmates in the Fulton jail are mentally ill, making it the largest mental
institution in the state.

The federal government reports that more than 110,000 Georgians need
substance abuse treatment but can't get it.

Among the chronically homeless, nearly 70 percent are mentally ill,
addicted or both.

Every study indicates it is dramatically less expensive to treat addictions
and mental health problems and provide housing than to operate prisons and
jails. In addition, treatment can break the cycle forever, while jail time
generally breeds more jail time.

If society's goal is to get the homeless off the streets, reduce crime and
reduce addiction, money must flow to services that achieve that goal. Those
services already exist, but are so poorly funded that they don't begin to
meet the screaming need. For example, the Fulton diversion court refers a
number of people to Jefferson Place, a program that offers intensive
addiction treatment followed by long-term transitional housing coupled with
job training. But only a few hundred people a year are helped there.

Judge Warden's diversion court is based on a recognition that many
defendants commit crimes only because of their mental illness or drug
addiction. If that problem is treated, the criminal behavior stops.
Unfortunately, the diversion court meets only one day a week, runs with a
staff of borrowed justice-system professionals who have other full-time
jobs and has placed perhaps 70 people.

If it were to operate more frequently and process more cases, it would
immediately overwhelm the couple of dozen treatment programs available in
the county, most of which already have waiting lists for clients.

Yet, says Warden, "it has been amazing to me what we can do," even one
person at a time.

Her court and a few more like it around the metro area and the state are
slowly shifting the burden of treating the mentally ill away from the jails
toward services designed to serve that purpose. It's not a revolutionary
concept: Tax money should be spent where it will actually solve problems,
instead of where it will continue to cause them.

Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series on how the lack of
mental health and addiction treatment in Georgia causes homelessness, jail
overcrowding and budget problems.