Suppose I told you that we – the state — could save hundreds of millions every year and reduce crime, simply by providing better treatment for the mentally ill?
That may sound nuts, but it also would be absolutely true. Here’s what I’m talking about: Michigan’s prison population has been shrinking, presumably because we are less inclined to sentence everyone caught with drugs to long prison terms.
From a peak of 51,000 a few years ago, we’re down to 38,600 inmates, according to Chris Gautz, a Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman.
But the number of mentally ill prisoners, many of them severely mentally ill, is steadily increasing. There were around 9,300 of these as of last week, Gautz said.
They present special problems. They cost a lot more to maintain and guard. The annual cost to the taxpayer of keeping someone in state prison is said to be a little more than $35,000 a year. But severely mentally ill prisoners cost more; on average, more than $95,000 year. Both those numbers are a couple of years old, and the figure may well be higher today.
Actually, there are about as many “geriatric” prisoners in Michigan prisons as there are mentally ill ones, and they are also terrifically expensive. The Department of Corrections, by the way, defines “geriatric” as being over 50.
Some are much older than that and are in special cells where the doors have been modified to accommodate their wheelchairs. Since inmates are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, the prison system spends hundreds of thousands on prescription drugs for some of them,
We taxpayers would save money if these wheelchair jockeys would be released; the state of Connecticut bought a nursing home for its paroled oldsters, and everyone is happier.
But here in Michigan, it’s more important that the politicians look tough on crime. As for the mentally ill:
Milton Mack, the state’s court administrator, was chief probate judge in Wayne County for many years. He has had to to deal frequently with the mental health system.
He knows what’s wrong, and believes he knows how to fix it in a way that would save us vast amounts of money and provide far better treatment for the mentally ill.
What we need, he told me, are ways to require patients diagnosed with treatable mental illness to take their medication before they get caught up in the criminal justice system.
“Prison is about the worst place for someone with mental illness,” he said. Mentally ill people often have a hard time following orders, and end up in trouble in prison, sometimes solitary confinement, which worsens their condition.
But they do much better on a system of court-ordered medication. Some may rightly be leery of a system where Big Brother can order you drugged, which is what Soviet psychiatric “hospitals” did in the bad old days.
Mack knows the dangers: “I am fully aware of the personal liberty interests here. We definitely need safeguards.”
He analyzed the problem and sketched out a solution in a recent policy paper. ”Decriminalization of Mental Illness: Fixing a Broken System,” which can easily be found online.
He presented it last year to his fellow court administrators from every state in the union. It received unanimous approval.
And lo and behold, the legislature may even do something sensible here. A package of bills that would help do what he recommends, HB 5810 and 5818, 19 and 20 overwhelmingly passed the House this year.
Now, they are before the Senate. The question is, will the Senate take them up before they recess to campaign?
By the way, know what the cost is of keeping somebody properly medicated, as opposed to being locked up?
According to Mack, the state spends an average of $5,741 on outpatient treatment for such patients.
By the way, it’s common knowledge that prison populations soared after former Gov. John Engler closed Detroit’s Lafayette Clinic, Pontiac’s Clinton Valley and other mental hospitals in the state. That’s true enough.
But he doesn’t deserve all the blame. Congress gave states financial incentives to close those old mental hospitals, when they passed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963.
The idea, Milton Mack told me, was that Washington would fund a network of community mental health centers to replace the services that the old hospitals had provided.
Except … they never funded them. It wouldn’t be too late to do this; nobody wants the old dungeon-like “hospitals” back.
Nor does impoverishing ourselves by keeping mentally ill people tortured in our prisons seem like a brilliant way to go,
***
Corrupt to the core: There’s a character in the legislature named Lee Chatfield, who is in line to become the next Speaker of the Michigan House, unless Democrats pick up the nine seats they need to win a majority.
Chatfield, who is 30, believes in Jesus, religious and/or home schooling and is from the town of Levering near the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula. Levering had one major attraction – a giant plastic chicken on the roof of its only restaurant, the Levering Café. I’ve eaten there, and the good news is that it’s now out of business.
But Levering still has Chatfield. Last year, right after taking office, he showed his true grasp of the state’s needs by supporting reducing the state income tax by a tenth of a percent a year until it was entirely gone.
He didn’t say whether Jesus would then heal the potholes, but I guess you have to take some things on faith.
It isn’t illegal to have nutty ideas. However, it is clearly illegal to try to get on an airplane with a loaded, unregistered handgun in your backpack – which Chatfield did last month. Anyone doubt what would happen if you and I were to try that? We’d soon be sitting in a cell with some very sore body cavities.
The next day, they would be setting the date for our trial. But we aren’t Lee Chatfield, who not only talks to Yeshua, he takes shekels from the local prosecutor.
We don’t have any idea why Chatfield tried to take the handgun on the plane, though he later verbally mumbled on Facebook that he carries it “on a daily basis for protection of myself and my family,” presumably from mosquitoes.
You’d think he’d be in big trouble. You would also think that James Linderman, the Emmet County prosecutor, should have either charged Chatfield or recused himself from the case. After all, he has contributed $625 to his campaigns.
But no; the prosecutor evidently felt his job was to find a way to protect his investment. He suddenly announced he couldn’t charge Chatfield because the law is defective.
True, state law is very clear that attempting to take a firearm on an airplane is a felony. But is also says that first bringing it into a “sterile area” is a misdemeanor.
There is, however, no official definition of what a “sterile area” is. Okay, a normal person would say. Just charge Chatfield with the felony. But that’s not how Lindeman saw it.
Nononono. When he finally put out a press release three weeks after the event, Lindeman said because it was unclear what a “sterile area” was, he couldn’t charge Chatfield at all.
That’s legal reasoning, up north style.
Our next Speaker of the House-wannabe gallantly said he’d pay the fine if Washington socked him with one, and to show he was just plain folks like you and me, he even promised to register the handgun. So now we have a legal precedent.
I suppose this means you can pack your heat in your purse and try to get on a flight at Metro and not have to worry about any charges if you get caught.
But I wouldn’t try it, just the same.
