Vincent Sheheen might have lost the governor’s race, but he’s still got a bunch of great ideas to make South Carolina a much better place.
The state senator from Camden’s latest proposal [S. 426] seeks to create a mental health court program that diverts low-level offenders who are mentally ill into appropriate treatment programs to keep them from spiraling into jails or prisons.
If you recall headlines from last year, South Carolina is long overdue for such a sane proposal for dealing with mentally-ill offenders. In the past, we shoved many aside, warehousing them more like chickens than humans.
This strategy of neglect got the state in real, big trouble.
Just over a year ago, a state circuit judge spanked the state Department of Corrections for exposing “seriously mentally ill inmates to substantial risk of serious harm.” The ruling, in which the judge gave the agency 180 days to come up with a plan to fix the problem, followed a 2005 lawsuit that documented how unruly mentally ill prisoners were locked in solitary confinement for months and years, some of whom would lie in their own excrement or blood. After the department unsuccessfully appealed the ruling, it announced a preliminary agreement last month with an advocacy group to hire more mental health specialists and create better conditions.
In South Carolina, like the rest of the nation, the general neglect of the mentally ill stemmed from the deinstitutionalization of residential mental health facilities more than a generation ago. That strategy, fueled by new “miracle” medications to help the mentally ill keep on a more even keel, led floods of former patients on community streets. Yes, it saved money. But the rosy notion that everything would be O.K. as long as formerly hospitalized residents took their medication had a big flaw: they didn’t always take their meds.
Furthermore, communities were caught mostly by surprise. They didn’t have the local care options or resources to deal with people who had been in treatment in facilities. So as local governments grappled with what to do about those suffering from mental illness, they often ended up in emergency rooms if they really needed help. Or worse, they would get nabbed for petty crimes time and again and head to a local jail — again warehoused, but in a different way. Neither option was cheap.
“When we deinstitutionalized — instead of shifting those [state] assets to help community, they dumped them on the street,” Sheheen observed.
So today, he is pushing for a statewide framework run by counties that is based on the state’s successful drug court program. The new structure should help communities deal with the mentally ill and get them in treatment and stabilized before they get in serious trouble with the law that locks them in local jails for awhile.
Sheheen stresses that mental health courts aren’t for people who commit serious crimes. The existing corrections system will handle that — and it is changing to handle them better.
“The whole goal is to stop it before it leads to problems we see,” he said. “This is for folks who commit disorderly conduct and people who might have a minor type of crime who repeatedly get into the criminal justice system.”
A few larger counties, such as Greenville, have the program and find it saves money because front-end treatment keeps people out of expensive-to-operate local emergency rooms and jails, Sheheen said.
Eventually if county programs showed broad success, as happened with the drug court program to keep those with minor offenses out of prison with alternative sentences, the state might be able to help with costs, he said.
In the meantime, there’s other work that can be done in prisons to continue to turn around conditions that led to the lawsuit. The state needs to, for example, put more money in mental health counselors in prisons and provide more professional training for guards.
And that may be on the way sooner than later. But as Sheheen noted, “I’ve learned in Columbia that you’ve got to crawl before you walk.”
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!