ESCAPEES BRING PRISON SCRUTINY

The dramatic escape of seven Texas prisoners, plus the fact they are
suspected of killing a police officer, plus the fact they eluded
capture after four long weeks, plus concerns about what could happen
before they are recaptured, all have elevated our state prison system
to a new level of intense scrutiny.

The reward offer, going into the weekend, was up to $300,000 for
information leading to the arrest of the men who -- way back on Dec.
13 -- executed their well-planned exit from a maximum security prison.

Top bananas of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice obviously had
hoped to quiet things down with an internal investigation into the
escape. Their report placed the blame on a handful of guards and
employees. But some of our state legislators still have questions to
raise in hearings that are set to start in two or three days.

So this seems like a good time to mention Tom Hamilton's idea about
how prison system money and resources could be better focused upon
protecting society from violent criminals.

Mentally ill don't need prison

"There is a real opportunity for this state to step up and do
something quite special," said Hamilton, who is president of NAMI
Texas (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Texas), which has a
membership of about 10,000.

Hamilton recently was appointed to the board of trustees of the
Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority (MHMRA) of Harris
County. (To pay his bills, he works as head of EEX Corp., a publicly
traded oil and gas company in Houston.)

He said that current estimates put the number of people with mental
illness in Texas prisons and jails at between 16,000 and 24,000.
While some of them landed there because they committed violent or
serious crimes, "the vast majority don't belong behind bars."

Most were convicted of minor crimes -- theft, disorderly conduct,
trespassing, alcohol or drug abuse, vagrancy -- that would not have
been committed if they'd had access to proper care for their mental
illnesses.

"People with bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia
usually have been jailed because of a shortage of effective treatment
elsewhere," Hamilton said. "Mental disorders are biological
conditions that respond positively to new-generation anti-psychotic
drugs. Community-based mental health services can divert people with
mental illness from prison by treating them with such drugs."

With today's modern medications the efficacy rate is 85 percent or
more for some mental disorders, and that is a higher success rate
than found with treatment of many other illnesses, Hamilton said. So
it is easy to see that such preventive treatment would be much less
costly than keeping the mentally ill in prison. And immeasurably more
humane.

While mental illnesses "are not the result of character flaws or
personal choice," he said, access to care continues to be a major
problem because mental illness continues to be highly stigmatized in
our society. He called it "the greatest remaining area of
discrimination in this country."

Wise spending will make room

As a result of that stigma, politicians long have run the risk of
appearing to be soft on crime if they favored taking steps to set
things right on mental illness treatment. However, Hamilton said,
progress was made in turning that around in 1999, when the
Legislature approved nearly $70 million for new-generation medicines
and support services.

"Lawmakers now should consider giving the same priority to a mentally
ill person in the criminal justice system as they do to someone in
the public mental health system," he said. "That means adding more
mental health professionals to the criminal justice system to improve
screening and treatment."

Texas prison officials are expected soon to ask our elected crew at
the Capitol to vote them a big potful of money to add more beds.
Hamilton said his idea is better: keep people with mental illness
from falling through the cracks into the criminal justice system and
there will be plenty of beds for the violent and dangerous criminals.

"It is neither wise nor effective to use tax dollars to jail a person
with mental illness if his behavior is solely a manifestation of an
untreated illness," he said. "To do so would make use of the same
unfounded public policy that promoted leper colonies in the first
half of the 20th century."