People with mental health issues who are arrested are often left to languish in county jails in this state for a year or more waiting on beds to become available at the Arkansas State Hospital.
Most of the inmates are under court orders to receive in-patient treatment after being found not fit to proceed, and/or not criminally responsible for their acts.
They are in the custody of the Department of Human Services (DHS), since the Arkansas State Hospital (ASH) is one of the operating divisions of the agency.
Baxter County currently has three inmates that have been on the waiting list for months.
According to DHS, during the most recent week for which records are available, there were 141 people in various inmate groups waiting in county jails.
A majority of the prisoners are locked up waiting for a bed to open at ASH so they can start treatment.
The treatment is aimed at “restoring” them to a point where they are mentally fit to participate in their trial and can be held criminally responsible for the crime they are alleged to have committed.
If they cannot be “restored,” the inmates would remain in DHS custody for further treatment.
SYSTEM DECLARED UNCONSTITUTIONAL
The entire system whose processes and procedures create the long waits during which the inmate goes without trial or treatment was declared unconstitutional at the conclusion of a 2001 trial in Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
A settlement was reached on behalf of all inmates waiting to be transferred to ASH for treatment at the time the suit was filed.
The court issued a decree laying out a number of steps DHS would be required to take to help alleviate the situation for the class of inmates named in the suit.
Debora Inman, an attorney with DHS, tells KTLO, Classic Hits and the Boot news that once the suit was settled, the decree expired.
But, if the waiting list system was ruled unconstitutional in 2002, and if it has not changed drastically since that time, the question might be asked – could other courts be expected to rule in a similar fashion in any new suits that might be filed?
Mental health advocates say one big reason the problem is not being taken care of is that people don’t really care about the treatment of those with mental illness, especially if they have been accused of crimes.
What the average citizen seems to want more than anything, according to professionals in the field, is for mentally ill people to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind.
An official at the state hospital testifying in the 2002 federal court case said it was not the hospital pushing aside the problems of the mentally ill, but society in general.
He told the court, “Employees at ASH were using resources available to them as creatively and efficiently as possible” to meet the needs of patients at the facility.
Another person in the mental health field wrote “if you are talking about the mentally ill, or inmates in the state prison system, there is not much sympathy on the part of the general public. That translates into very little sympathy in the legislature to provide funds to expand and improve the system.”
One question frequently asked during the 2002 trial appears as valid today as it did 20 years ago.
Why didn’t the State of Arkansas work out and implement a solution to the problem of keeping inmates locked up in local jails waiting on a bed to open in the state hospital?
While presiding over the 2002 trial, Federal District Judge Stephen Reasoner asked at one point during the litigation why the intervention of a federal court was necessary to resolve the situation, as opposed to relying on the state legislature.
He said Arkansas officials “readily admit the inadequacies of the current system, but appear unwilling to do anything about it.”
One attorney helping present the plaintiff’s case in 2002 told the judge, “The political will is not there. Most people are unaware of the problem, don’t work very hard to become aware, and, as a consequence, are unsympathetic and not pressing their elected representatives to provide funds to adequately address the situation.
The attorney told the court “the state has been aware of the deficiencies in this system for decades, yet the problem has not been fixed.”
In talking to law officers, attorneys, judges and friends and family of those being held in jails waiting on space to open at ASH, they all say state government always falls back on the excuse, “there is no money, we can’t do better, we are doing all we can.”
It’s ironic, they say, to hear the protestations of poverty when it was recently announced the state has surplus funds approaching $1,000,000,000.
When Judge Reasoner issued his opinion, he wrote it could be concluded, “The entire state of Arkansas, including the executive and legislative branches, has been deliberately indifferent to the needs of pretrial detainees ordered to receive mental health evaluations or treatment.’
PART II
In our next report, a look at steps being taken to address the mental health needs of inmates in Arkansas.
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