ALTERNATIVES TO JAIL

State Should Invest In Rehab

In the mid 1970s, lawmakers decided to shut down state mental health
institutions, which were run so badly, cheaply and tragically that
lawmakers decided practically anything had to be better than to continue
this warehousing.

"Deinstitutionalization," as it was called, shifted thousands of the
mentally ill and drug or alcohol impaired Floridians out of the wards and,
in some cases, sent them to community based half-way houses and other
services that have never been sufficient to the task. In many cases,
though, this shift in policies sent people into the streets or into a lives
of constant turmoil that often included petty crime.

The effect of this shift on the criminal justice system wasn't anticipated
sufficiently. In the last 30 years, local jails have absorbed an endless
stream of men and women with drug, alcohol and mental or emotional
problems. Arrested repeatedly and primarily for misdemeanors, they go in
and out of jails, serving short terms but getting no real help in breaking
their addictions or restoring order to their lives.

Sheriff John Rutherford of Jacksonville, one of Florida's most conservative
cities, is trying to get lawmakers and Floridians to wake up to the
uselessness of our revolving door system, which is in operation in his jail
and most others statewide. He has a boat load of statistics, but one of the
most revealing is that in one year in Duval County, 738 people were jailed
4,738 times.

"In that group we found the severely addicted and those with severe mental
health issues plus career criminals. Just their booking costs and
incarceration costs that year reached $10.3 million," Mr. Rutherford said.
"It's an injustice to the taxpayers but it is also an injustice to these
people and their families and communities."

Of course he wants career criminals "locked up for as long as possible," he
said, but people such as a Jacksonville man arrested 27 times for
disorderly intoxication and breach of the peace has done nothing but go
downhill in his life, losing his job, his family, his health. He never
volunteered for help, but neither was the law strong enough to force him
into a secure rehabilitation program.

That is basically what last year's "Habitual Misdemeanor Offender" law did
when lawmakers passed it, saying that upon your fifth arrest for a
misdemeanor you become "eligible," Mr. Rutherford says carefully, for
either jail or for the same sentence in a secure community based mental
health or abuse rehabilitation center.

The new law essentially gives judges more power to impose sentences long
enough - 180 days instead of the short spurts of 30 to 60 days - to get a
person into a program that will have a chance of doing some good.

Previously, judges' choices in handling these life-style crimes was
limited, with a person either pleading or else going to trial.

"We can't try every public intoxication case; the courts couldn't handle
it," says Mr. Rutherford, who has been in law enforcement since getting his
criminology degree at Florida State University in the early '70s, just as
the state was shutting down the mental institutions. He has watched the
whole cycle of unintended consequences.

Though the new law is in place and judges are beginning to exercise it,
there is still a dearth of effective community-based centers. Statewide,
Mr. Rutherford is telling lawmakers, another $91 million is needed to more
adequately fund community treatment.

The Habitual Misdemeanor Offender law has had critics, of course, including
groups that regret the either/or sentences - jail or rehab - are longer
than just jail time was before. But it's a kind of tough love that
practical law enforcement officers such as John Rutherford are trying to
bring back into public policy.

Lawmakers have a lot of decisions to make about crimefighting, but breaking
this expensive and nonproductive revolving door would be a smart, humane
investment that most county sheriffs statewide, the tough guys of law
enforcement, support.