With these budget cuts it's brought the problem to a head. In Wayne County and Detroit, there have been millions of dollars in cuts over past few years. The bargain 15 years ago was, "we're going to close these psychiatric hospitals but invest more in community (mental health) services." That never happened, but in the past three to four years, it's gotten even worse. There were a couple of community meetings (on mental health services) this past summer and I heard a sheriff say how his jail is the biggest mental health institution in the county, which every sheriff in every county could say. I write a lot about prison issues, urban affairs and criminal justice - it's a natural evolution of covering a beat and knowing what the trends are. How did you come to write about this issue, and why now?
DETROIT FREE PRESS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR HOW TO
Next week, I'll offer some tips on how to track mental health funding in your area and assess how people are affected. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Gerritt talked with me today about how he reported the column, and his insights are useful for anyone who's considering exploring similar issues in their own communities. The state has resumed warehousing its mentally ill - this time behind bars. Over the last two decades, changes in state policy and big cuts in funding for community mental health care have pushed hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people into county jails and state prisonsĬommunity mental health agencies - which were supposed to take up the slack but never received the resources to do so - face continuing budget cuts. Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon spoke for most sheriffs when he said, during a community meeting earlier this year, that his jail had become his county's largest mental health care institution.
The column, by Free Press columnist and editorial writer Jeff Gerritt, was noteworthy for the way it put the increasing incarceration of mentally ill people in historical context and tied the phenomenon directly to budget cuts. Unsurprisingly, they're not very good ones. A recent Detroit Free Press column illustrates what happens when you cut mental health services in a community: jails become the new mental hospitals.