Advocates raise mental illness concerns of inmates after Council vote
9th December 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In the wake of the New Orleans City Council’s initial approval of an attempt to adequately house inmates with mental illnesses at the Orleans Parish prison, the complex depth of the issues raised by the housing plan need to be parsed, identified and addressed, advocates on all sides say.
In particular is figuring out the nature of the relationship between crime and mental illness. While it’s important to provide mentally ill inmates with proper treatment while they’re incarcerated, some say, it’s equally crucial that the general public doesn’t automatically equate criminality and mental illness as essentially the same thing.
“We have to understand that being mentally ill is not a crime,” said City Councilman Jay Banks, who championed the jail complex proposal that was approved by the Council last Thursday. “We need more mental health services so we can provide better treatment in the community. That is definitely not debatable.”
While Banks added that “mental health treatment must not be conflated with the jail issue,” he also acknowledged that the lack of adequate care “is not lost in the mix.”
However, some prison-reform advocates said the issues are more nuanced, stressing that by somehow compartmentalizing and extricating the challenges involved in an effort to not criminalize mental illnesses, society often ignores the fact that many people do end up in prison because of mental illness.
In addition, they say, keeping the issues separate often prevents mentally ill inmates from receiving the necessary treatment to prevent recidivism and help people integrate into the community after they’re released from incarceration.
There’s also the issue of whether the mentally ill should be housed in prisons at all.
“We have the saying, ‘You can’t get well in a cell,’” said Sade Dumas, executive director of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, members of which joined other prison reform advocates in an overnight, protest sleep out in Duncan Plaza leading up to the City Council meeting last Thursday morning.
“Orleans Parish Prison is not a place for anyone, and especially not for those vulnerable members of the population,” she added.
Many prison reform advocates and other concerned parties addressed the City Council at its meeting last week to express wariness with the past and future handling of a swelling jail population – a population that includes dozens, if not hundreds, of inmates in dire need of proper mental health care.
Much of the criticism – as well as voluminous past public outcry – was directed at Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, whose administration operates the parish jail and who, according to some critics, has been operating the TDC illegally for several years and has insufficiently addressed the size of the inmate population.
Dumas said the fact that several inmates have died at the Orleans Parish prison, some by suicide, while they were under health watch or other special attention protocols reveals how woefully insufficient mental health care is in the facility. That dearth of care will only worsen when the couple-dozen mentally-ill inmates kicked out of state prison are jammed into the parish jail, even in a retrofitted facility.
“If that can happen while someone is under medical care,” she said, “if you can have deaths and suicides, I’m worried about the 25 people who are coming down here [from state prison]. This is a whole new challenge for the sheriff to address.”
The events that opened such discussions occurred most recently last week, when the City Council gave its initial approval of a plan to house dozens of special needs inmates who were booted out of a state prison by the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in the what has been known as the Temporary Detention Center on Perdido Street in New Orleans.
The city facility was constructed as a temporary incarceration solution following Hurricane Katrina, but as time wore on, and after state and local leaders kicked the issue of jail housing down the road, some residents became upset that a supposedly temporary facility had effectively become permanent despite the opening of the new $150-million main jail, the Orleans Justice Center in 2015.
Others in the community continued a push toward prison reform and a desire to decrease the inmate population in Orleans Parish, especially at the jail. Complicating the matter further was the pressing need to comply with an existing federal consent decree requiring the city to reduce the inmate population in the jail system locally.
Officials with the city and Gusman’s office thus banged out a plan to place the special-needs inmates who were shooed out of state prison in the Temporary Detention Center, while capping the inmate population at the jail at 1,250.
As a result, the Council gave its initial consent for the conversion project – the measure must be OK’ed by the Council one more time to put the strategy into effect – by approving a zoning change allowing for the construction and retrofitting work needed to turn the Temporary Detention Center into a new home for mentally ill inmates and other vulnerable members of the inmate population.
In a statement to the media after last week’s vote, Gusman applauded the City Council’s decision. He said he and his administration remain concerned about the vulnerable members of the inmate population.
“We thank the City Council for unanimously acting to authorize use of the Temporary Detention Center as a short-term solution for mental health housing,” Gusman said. “We look forward to completion and occupancy of the City’s special needs facility, which will serve as a permanent facility to treat our most seriously mentally ill inmates.”
Banks said critics must realize that what was at stake at last week’s meeting was solely the zoning change, which, he acknowledged, doesn’t come close to adequately addressing the need for more mental health care in the prison and in the community as a whole.
That, he said, is an issue for another day – albeit a day that must come soon, he added. Banks stressed that city officials and other pertinent parties are currently in discussions about exactly how to provide better, more accessible mental health care to the community, a universal, societal challenge exacerbated by former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s draconian slashing of the state’s mental health treatment and prevention budget that resulted in hospital closings and other restricted access to adequate care.
While Banks stressed that mental illness must not be criminalized, he also acknowledged that the lack of adequate mental health care in the community does lead to higher jail populations, reflecting how those with mental illnesses and other special needs often go without help and care and how that dire situation can lead to larger inmate populations.
‘“The [mental health] services have to be expanded long before people get to jail,” he said.
“This issue is bigger than the city,” he added. “This issue includes the state and the whole of national policy.”
Dumas echoed Banks’ distress at the lack of proper special needs care in the community, saying that a society-wide, holistic approach to the challenges of the mentally ill will be fundamental toward ultimately reducing the number of people who are incarcerated locally, in the state and nationally.
“We need a community-centered approach,” she said. “We address [the issue] by providing more support in the community. We can’t just throw people in jail, where there’s a lack of adequate health care. But it’s a discussion we’re not having. We talk about providing services [for mental health], but we can’t just talk about it.”
This article originally published in the December 9, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
