LA Jail System Not Expanding After All As Taft Deal Dies

Prison reform advocates were appalled when Los Angeles County’s top elected officials last month agreed to lease an empty jail about two hours from Downtown LA.

“It’s so disappointing,” Lynne Lyman, the California director for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national advocacy group, said at the time.

Los Angeles County, which includes the city of LA, already had more people behind bars than any other U.S. county or city -- more than Miami and New York City combined. By adding the remote Taft city jail to its network of crowded facilities, the county would be able to lock up about 500 more people, raising its total inmate population as high as 22,000.

But on Tuesday, the county scrapped the plan after a key supporter changed her mind. Now, the county will have to come up with another way to relieve overcrowding in its jails.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who joined two of her colleagues in a 3-2 vote for the deal last month, told the Los Angeles Times she reversed her position after learning about an ongoing legal battle over the Taft jail. Until 2011, California used the Taft facility to house state inmates. Last year, Taft sued the state, after the state canceled the contract.

Molina told the LA Times she didn’t want the county to get dragged into the dispute. Molina’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Huffington Post on Wednesday. Molina generally favors jail expansion, and the county is likely to come up with another plan for enlarging its jail system soon.

In the meantime, prison reform advocates said they hope to convince Molina and the other county supervisors to support what they call “alternatives to incarceration.” That includes substance-abuse treatment, transitional housing, and other programs aimed at making sure people don’t go back to jail after they’re freed.

“Most of the people going into the jail system were already disconnected from basic services, such as housing, health services, and employment,” said Lyman. “Services provided after release can help them establish a basic foundation that moves them toward long term stabilization and ensure they do not return to jail.”

LA’s struggle with jail overcrowding goes back to 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law that shifted responsibility for many low-level, nonviolent offenders from the state to the counties in an attempt to ease overcrowding in state prisons.

To fund the program, Brown dedicated a portion of state sales tax revenues and vehicle licensing fees to the counties. In the program’s first three years, Los Angeles has received more than $700 million.

Lyman and her colleagues said they had hoped the county would spend that money on substance-abuse treatment programs, prisoner-reentry programs, and other alternatives to incarceration.

So far, however, only about 5 percent of LA’s funds have gone to reentry programs, although an additional 15 percent has gone to the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Public Health for treatment services.

“We are not investing in what we know works,” said Lyman.

In some parts of California, including San Francisco and Santa Clara, counties have invested in a different approach. Two years ago, for example, Santa Clara opened a reentry center that provides services to people coming out of prison or jail.

Ten months after the program began, only 20 percent of released inmates in the county were getting rearrested, compared with about 65 percent before the center opened.

By investing in similar programs, prison reformers said, LA could reduce its jail population by thousands of inmates.

“I walk the jails every month,” said Herman Avilez, the head of California Drug Counseling, a group that provides substance-abuse counseling and other services to low-income people in Pasadena. “Those places are packed with people that shouldn’t be in there.”

via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/la-jails-taft_n_4179372.html

Jail is No Place to Treat Women’s Mental Health Issues

by Karen Shain, Criminal Justice Policy Officer

The first thing I noticed when we walked into the cell block was a woman sitting on top of a metal table. She saw us and slowly crawled off the table to sit on a metal stool. That’s as far as she could go, because she was tethered to the table by a chain.

A guard told us it’s a violation to sit on the table, but they don’t sweat the small stuff in the mental health wing. We weren’t in a mental health facility; this was the Century Regional Detention Facility (CRDF), L.A. County’s main women’s jail.

This is where CRDF holds seriously mentally ill women who don’t have the resources to be admitted into private mental health hospitals. The guards explained that the women were always under physical control. They could stay in their single cells (which contained a metal bed and a toilet), be locked into a shower by themselves, could go “outside” (though a roof prevents them from seeing the sky or the sun), or they could sit chained to a table in the “day room.”

As long as a County mental health professional deems them a danger to themselves or others, these women will be held indefinitely.  The only way out is for them to get better, but how can they get better under these circumstances?

Mental illness is not a crime; it is a disease. CRDF does not treat women with this disease. It only pushes them further inward, back into their demons. What I witnessed was torture. Is that the best we can do?

I left the mental health wing of CRDF with an extremely heavy heart. But I also realized that if the Sheriff’s Department showed us this mental health wing – something they can’t be proud of – they must be looking for advocates to help them fund a new jail with improved conditions for women.

But even the goal of “improved” conditions misses the point.  Treatment, not incarceration, is the solution for most women, and effective treatment cannot happen under duress.
Nearly one out of every three women (31 percent) in county jails is there because of mental illness, which is double the percentage for men. As the nation and California dismantled mental health facilities and funding over the decades, our jails and prisons have become the largest mental institutions in the country. Believe it or not, they are also the largest geriatric facilities and homeless shelters.

Building more jails will not help these women or men, nor will it stop cycles of crime that jeopardize our neighborhoods and our personal safety because it is well-known that persons with mental illness who are put in jail have much higher rates of recidivism than those who receive mental health treatment in the community. Managing mentally ill people in our prisons and jails is also far more expensive than providing treatment in the community – treatment which is also much better than what is provided in jail.

This is not only about Los Angeles; it’s a national problem. But Los Angeles has the opportunity to do something better.

The LA Board of Supervisors is at a crossroads. They have several proposals before them to construct both a new women’s and mental health jail. The construction cost? Between $1.4-$1.6 billion, which does notinclude operating expenses, such as the almost $250 per day it costs to house and treat a woman with mental illness in jail. What if we tried something different—and better? Let’s redirect these billion plus dollars and invest instead in comprehensive and humane mental health and substance abuse treatment. As the Affordable Care Act (ACA), our national health reform law, is implemented in coming months, we have an opportunity to expand mental health and substance abuse access and treatment. Under ACA people who are financially eligible will be able to get mental health and substance abuse treatment at very little cost to California, but ONLY if they are not in jail.

California’s residents who bear the double burden of being impoverished and mentally ill should not find that their only option for mental health treatment is available if they fall into the criminal justice system. Treating them in the community would be the real way to improve their lives and those of their families and community, not putting them in a new and costly jail.

via http://womensfoundationofcalifornia.org/2013/10/18/jail-is-no-place-to-treat-womens-mental-health-issues/