In some cases, people facing minor charges have spent longer
in jail waiting to go to a hospital than the time they would have served had
they been sentenced. State officials across the country are looking for
possible solutions, from building more beds to keeping individuals with mental
illness out of the justice system entirely.
In Pennsylvania, the state chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state Department of Human Services in 2015 over
these delays, settled twice and has since filed another motion asking the court
to intervene.
Data from the state Department of Human Services obtained by
The Marshall Project and Frontline show that defendants are finally getting
into hospital beds more quickly. As of April, defendants in Pennsylvania waited
an average of 24 days to be admitted for “competency restoration”—the legal
term for providing basic mental health care so someone is coherent enough to
understand the charges against them and assist in their defense. That’s down
from the peak of the crisis in January 2017, when defendants had been waiting
an average of eight months to get into a hospital and an average of more than a
year for Norristown State Hospital.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services
said in an email that the agency was working to speed up the system even more,
after investing over $63 million since 2016, in part to add 175 more hospital
beds, and also funding community treatment options. “We are not able to control
the number of referrals we receive for competency restoration treatment,” wrote
the spokesperson, Ali Fogarty. “We have been and remain committed to reducing
the length of time that individuals in the criminal justice system wait for
mental health and psychiatric treatment.”
But wait times are still too long, said Vic Walczak, legal
director of the Pennsylvania ACLU. And as the statewide legal battle plays on,
families like Marcelline's are stuck in the middle. The ACLU is now pushing for
a seven-day limit; federal courts have ruled that anything longer is a
violation of rights. “Keeping them in jail is illegal. And from a health
perspective, some of them could suffer irreparable harm,” Walczak said.
Legal battles have also been waged over wait times in Oregon, Colorado, Alabama, Louisiana, Nevada, Utah and Washington.
Many states have struggled to comply with court rulings, some racking up
millions of dollars in fines and investing millions to build beds to try to
meet the need. Civil rights attorneys have filed numerous lawsuits trying to
fix this problem by setting strict time limits. But without enforcement, states
are routinely blowing past these deadlines.
Attorneys, forensic psychiatrists and hospital
administrators say the real problem is a system that fails to distinguish
between who needs to be in the justice system and who could be served in a
cheaper community setting.
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