Mississippi’s Departments of Corrections and Mental Health have received a federal grant for $647,461 to aid inmates with mental illness and substance abuse disorders in re-entering society following incarceration.
The Mississippi Second Chance Act Reentry Program will be the first of its kind in the state, said Pamela Smith of DMH. And though the initial phase is targeted for inmates released to Hinds County, the hope is that it will become a model that will spread to other areas of the state.
In its first phase, the program will assess, follow and treat 90 carefully screened and identified inmates, all of them at high risk in re-entering the system because of concurrent mental illness and substance abuse disorders.
The pilot program has a three-year window to provide needed services and assess thoroughly the effectiveness of this kind of intervention.
Fundamentally, the program will expand evaluation of the needs of inmates leaving the system while they are still in prison. Then it will coordinate a holistic and intensive community-based mental health plan once inmates are released.
Federal guidelines target a specific segment of the prison population that often goes untreated or overlooked and tends to have high recidivism rates.
“What’s going to happen is 90 days prior to release, coming up with a re-entry plan for those inmates known to have mental illness combined with substance abuse disorders,” Smith said. “Currently that evaluation happens about 30 days before release.”
Staff conducting these evaluations will look at a complex web of needs and issues facing those with mental illness and substance abuse disorders, including stress, family structure, physical health, education and other factors that directly affect safety, mental health and quality of life.
Based on the assessed needs, community resources will be identified and put in place for the client’s use once he or she is released from prison.
Discharged inmates in the program will receive intensive outpatient treatment, Smith said. Peer support services will help newly released inmates with referrals to services in the community that might help with housing and other types of needed support, including dealing with government bureaucracies to find and secure needed benefits.
The idea is to keep them from re-entering the system.
MDOC Commissioner Marshall Fisher has said it’s a practical matter of reducing recidivism in a way that can be accurately measured under intense supervision.
“All (inmates) except for those on death row and those doing life without parole, all these people who are behind bars right now are going to return to our communities,” Fisher said in a recent Mississippi Public Broadcasting interview.
Beyond reducing recidivism, removing the chronically mentally ill from jails and prisons is an important goal in a system that in recent decades has become overwhelmingly a holding place for people who get in trouble with the law because of their illness and end up incarcerated rather than treated.
The Leflore County Jail sees a good number of inmates with mental health problems, and Life Help, the District 6 mental health center, is a frequently used local resource, Sheriff Ricky Banks said.
“We have a nurse in the jail, an RN, and when someone needs help, she lets us know, and we set up an appointment with Life Help,” he said. Some of those inmates already have a history with the local mental health care provider, he said.
Life Help Executive Director Phaedre Cole said it also has specially trained mobile crisis teams that are available and on call to assist law enforcement when they go out on a call that may involve a mentally ill individual.
“There's a lot of overlap between what we do and what local law enforcement is dealing with,” Cole said. Life Help staff also provide Mental Health First Aid Training in the community, available to law enforcement and others to teach them how to interact with mentally ill people.
In recent years, Mississippi has been the object of a great deal of federal scrutiny — both at DMH for its practice of putting mentally ill people away rather than providing adequate community-based services, and at MDOC for sub-standard living conditions and treatment for mentally ill state inmates housed at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility (EMCF) at Meridian.
In August, the U.S. Justice Department sued Mississippi for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by “unnecessarily and illegally” making mentally ill people go into state-run psychiatric hospitals rather than providing community-bound services.
In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the state over unsanitary living conditions at EMCF, a state-owned facility operated under contract by a private provider, specifically designated as a facility for “prisoners with special needs and serious psychiatric disabilities.”
Banks said that in the past year, he has seen an increase in the number of motions from attorneys asking that defendants awaiting trial be evaluated for mental illness.
“If they already have some problems, I’m all for it,” he said, although he added that sometimes he thinks attorneys use these evaluations as a delay tactic.
The state currently has only 35 Forensic Service beds at the state hospital designated for mental health evaluations and treatment, frequently causing long delays and longer stays in county jails.
Keeping released inmates known to have mental illness and substance abuse disorders from reentering jails and prisons, Second Chance program advocates argue, is intended to help ease that problem.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
