Rainier Springs Behavioral Health Hospital Chief Executive Officer Gary Peterson addresses a crowd gathered for the facility’s ribbon cutting Sept. 5. The 72-bed inpatient facility will provide another mental health resource in Clark County, which along with other programs and facilities, either already in place or being planned, will help to keep those with mental illness out of jail.
On July 24 Megan Jones appeared before the Clark County Council with a plea. Her husband, Johnny Jones was arrested following a domestic disturbance early morning on July 21. Johnny Jones was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in his 20s, and through medication he was able to live a stable life with his wife of 11 years and their children.
At that time, Megan Jones said her husband was not receiving the medication he needed, asking the council to intervene. When she spoke with The Reflector late last month she said her husband had been on medication for the past two weeks which made a significant difference compared to his condition at the time of his arrest.
“When we saw him last … I finally saw my husband again,” Megan Jones remarked, adding his biggest concern, understandably, was getting out of jail. That will take some time as he has been scheduled for restoration, a process by which those charged with a crime are brought to a level of competency to aid in their own defense.
As of late August, Johnny Jones will have to wait around six months before an opening at the embattled Western State Hospital will be available for restoration. Though, once that process was complete Megan Jones said the prosecution will drop the charges — but he still has to wait in the Clark County jail until that opening comes up.
“He’s going to have to spend that wait in jail instead of a hospital,” Megan Jones said.
How it got to this
The case of Johnny Jones is not at all isolated, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness Southwest Washington Executive Director Peggy McCarthy. She said his charge of domestic violence was commonly leveled in incidents involving individuals with mental illness, explaining that any instance where harm or damage to a person, place or thing occurs in a domicile or business can lead to the charge and arrest.
McCarthy, as well as authorities in law enforcement like Clark County Sheriff’s Chief Corrections Deputy Ric Bishop, said jail is not the best place for individuals with mental illness who have committed low-level offenses.
Bishop cited a 2010 statistic from the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association that stated 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have a serious mental illness.
Based on his own experiences, Bishop thinks that number is too low.
As to why those individuals end up in jail, McCarthy said family members who feel they can’t handle a situation with a loved one in crisis end up calling the police and inadvertently putting the individual into the jail system as they don’t understand the law.
It wasn’t always the case that people with mental illness were shipped off to jail in such frequency.
According to McCarthy, the prevalence stemmed from the closure of state mental hospitals in the 1980s. Those facilities were abhorrent. McCarthy said often patients spent the remainder of their lives in those places, more controlled than treated.
“We were not focusing at all at that time on the fact that people could become stable with their mental health,” McCarthy said.
However, community-based solutions to deal with mental illness didn’t immediately fill the void left when they closed. This caused individuals to be incarcerated rather than committed.
“Now the only place we have to put them is jails,” McCarthy remarked. “Since then it’s just become normal,” she later added. “Anybody who acts differently than society wants, just put them in jail.”
Further complicating things is the fact that Western State Hospital recently lost federal certification and funding, some $53 million annually. With Western State in a crisis of its own, Bishop said he has had to send inmates seeking restoration to other locations across the state, tying up jail resources in transportation.
Developments
Recently, several developments have put or will put resources in place to prevent jailing people in crisis.
The Southwest Washington Crisis Line can provide a resource outside of law enforcement to help resolve issues.
Two mobile crisis units have been in operation over the last year. One was focused on youth, ran by Catholic Community Services of Western Washington and another was for adults ran by Community Services Northwest. The units respond with a mental health professional and the assistance of an individual who had their own experiences with mental health issues, talking with the person in crisis in an attempt to de-escalate the situation. Both crisis units are relatively new, McCarthy said, with the youth unit starting about a year ago and the adult one beginning in July.
Another one of the most recent developments is the imminent opening of Rainier Springs Behavioral Health Hospital. The 72-bed inpatient facility also has outpatient services, and received a ribbon cutting Sept. 5, though there was still some paperwork before the facility could open its doors in earnest.
Megan Jones explained that when she and Johnny Jones lived in California before moving to Washington in 2010, he had good experiences with mental health services in their home state.
In Washington, they have found the outpatient care systems to be helpful when he is stable, “but when you are in crisis there’s nothing,” Megan Jones said.
Another resource coming to Clark County looks promising for McCarthy, Bishop, and other officials. Plans are in place to bring a crisis triage and stabilization center where individuals can stay for a short period of time in a supervised location that isn’t the jail, receiving care during their stay.
The facility would be small, with 16 beds for each of its crisis triage and substance abuse detox wings, but McCarthy said increases in availability would help to free up hospital space.
The triage center, to be located in the county jail’s work-release center on Lower River Road, will offer a place for officers to take individuals who would be better served there than in the jail. It offered the first line of help the jail has for both individuals with mental illness and those who wish to break the cycle of crime and incarceration.
Following the Trueblood Decision, a court case in 2015 which found that restoration processes were taking too long, Western State has provided some support to the jail by sending professionals to the location, Bishop said, adding that the jail itself had a “pretty robust” medical department. He noted one caveat: inmates could refuse to take medication or respond to rehabilitation options, their Constitutional right.
Internally, the jail has implemented a crisis intervention training class for officers. The 40-hour training focuses on interaction and help with discharging mentally ill individuals in the facility. It was the result of a rash of inmate deaths several years back which Bishop said was in part due to a feeling of hopelessness among the recently arrested who didn’t realize that jail was a temporary issue not requiring a permanent solution such as taking one’s life.
Under Sheriff Chuck Atkins, fighting recidivism for those willing to break the cycle of crime and incarceration has been a major focus. The jail has a 15-person re-entry unit designed to meet that end, linked to community partners who provide real-world skills, some of which might be taken for granted by the general population including how to job search as well as how to participate in a traffic stop.
Still, all the resources require a willing individual, which for someone with a mental illness might not be the case.
Along with the triage center are plans for 24-hour mental health assessments offered by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
Bishop said right now the main issue is the current setup of the jail, which a recently-formed correction facilities advisory commission was hoping to address. Those measures would help to keep individuals from ending up back in jail time and again, no matter their mental state.
“We want our re-entry model to start at our front door — to break the cycle there,” he said.
‘It’s something we never expected to happen’
Before the triage center opens — currently planned for next spring — McCarthy stressed other options, such as the crisis line and crisis units, were often a better solution than calling the cops to avoid situations like Johnny Jones.’
“That family would have been so much better off if everybody had gone to bed that night and nobody was hurt,” McCarthy remarked.
Megan Jones said one way other families can avoid a similar situation was to be honest with their mental illness challenges, noting she could have gotten her husband help had he signed a release to allow her to set up treatment with his regular therapist for him, before it led to his arrest.
“Even when you are stable, even when you are able to make those medical decisions for yourself, it’s really important to put those safeguards up just in case, God forbid, something should happen and you need someone to step in and make sure that you get the help that you need,” she said, later adding that “it’s something that we never expected to happen.”
