COSTLY, SENSELESS, CRUEL

Florida Needs a Much Better System for Treating Its Mentally Ill Citizens

Call them psychiatric warehouses.

That's how a report released by Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice
Fred Lewis and Gov. Charlie Crist describes Florida's jails and
prisons, where as many as 125,000 people with mental illnesses in
need of treatment get housed each year.

Most state mental institutions were closed in the 1960s and 70s --
supposedly a transition to more humane, community-based care.

But funding for local mental health services never materialized.

Since then Sunshine State jails have become de facto mental
institutions, says the report.

That includes the Brevard County jail in Sharpes, where about 20
percent of 1,830 inmates have some form of mental illness, ranging
from minor to acute, according to Lt. Darrell Hibbs of the Brevard
County Sheriff's Office.

Roughly 400 jail inmates go through mental health screening each
month, showing why a new medical and mental health annex is so direly needed.

The annex is expected to open in March, and the county will spend
$7.3 million to staff it.

The state's inadequate mental health care system also impacted
Brevard's jail in 2006, when at least eight seriously mentally ill
inmates found incompetent to stand trial were left there much longer
than allowed by law, meaning costs for their treatment were dumped on
local taxpayers.

That led Sheriff Jack Parker to consider legal action against the state.

The situation has been resolved temporarily, but is just a little
part of what's wrong with Florida's mental health system, as detailed
in the 170-page report.

The study group has rightly called for a radical fix that could keep
many of the mentally ill out of the criminal justice system from the
start, not to mention save the state millions of dollars.

It won't be easy, but here's what they recommend:

Redirecting some dollars now spent to lodge mentally ill inmates to
pay for local mental health care networks throughout the state,
starting with $20 million next year.

Preventative services, including drug-abuse treatment, for the
mentally ill at risk of incarceration could eventually save the state
$250 million annually, according to the report. The program would
target low-level offenders, such as drug and battery suspects, not
murderers, rapists or sex offenders.

That sounds like a promising strategy for the state to pursue, so
long as it doesn't turn into a bait and switch to pass more costs
along to localities already in a cash-crunch.

Using millions of dollars from the state-federal Medicaid program to
cover treatment costs.

Again, that sounds like a way to mitigate the rising expense of
jailing the mentally ill, whose numbers are expected to double by
2015 unless dramatic changes are made

But if those Medicaid dollars are available, why haven't they been
tapped before?

Despite some misgivings, we support the push to make prevention, and
humane, community-based treatment the cornerstone of Florida's mental
health system.