ANDERSON — In early April 2015, Geraldine Jones reportedly spirited Samantha Fleming to Lake County.
There, Jones allegedly killed the Anderson resident so she could steal Fleming’s 3-week-old baby. When Jones was found in Texas, she had checked herself into a hospital to be treated for depression.
On July 3, 2015, for reasons that remain unknown, Anderson resident Atul Navalo allegedly shot a couple of neighbors as they gathered free firewood next door to where he lived. Navalo was later shot and apprehended by a police officer. Investigators speculated that Navalo may have sought to initiate a “suicide by cop.”
On Dec. 12, 2015, William R. Rothel, again for unknown reasons, allegedly held a screwdriver to the neck of an 8-year-old boy — a stranger to him — at Pay Less Super Market, 3050 Meridian St.
These may be the high-profile cases where people snap. But it is a daily occurrence in Madison County for police to encounter people with some degree of mental illness.
Those police contacts may concern people who commit personal or property crimes; those who are victims of crimes; reports of real or imaginary incidents; or calls for medical help.
“Every one of these incidents, when we get dispatched out to a mentally ill individual, they’re all unique,” said Anderson Police Chief Tony Watters.
Though about 5 percent of the general population is believed to have severe mental illness, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates about 15 percent of men and 30 percent of women in local jails throughout the nation have a serious psychiatric disorder.
However, advocates for the mentally ill, law enforcement officers and court officials lament the severe lack of appropriate facilities and services throughout Indiana and in Madison County for people with severe mental illnesses.
“This wasn’t even a point of interest when I started as a police officer 27 years ago,” Watters said. “We need to be highly trained. We need to approach these situations with a high level of sensitivity and skill.”
Staffing and facilities
Madison County Sheriff Scott C. Mellinger is in his second term in that office, having served from 1991 to 1998, and then being elected to the post in 2014. In that role, he is the local Crisis Intervention Team liaison for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group.
“It’s worse than it was when I was sheriff before,” he said of the rate of contact between law enforcement and the mentally ill. He attributes that growth to a poor economy that has led residents to drug and alcohol addictions.
The Madison County Jail has neither the facilities nor the staff to deal with the increasing needs of inmates whose acts, rooted in emotional disorders, land them there, Mellinger said.
“We do not have the resources or facilities to handle that without being under a huge liability,” he said. “I can’t believe we haven’t had people hurt more often because of the behaviors of the people we have in jail.”
Jail or prison, with its more violent offenders, simply is not an appropriate or therapeutic setting for those with severe mental illnesses, Mellinger said. For that matter, he said, he isn’t a fan of using the jail for those accused of public intoxication.
“Basically, with these people, we’re becoming an overnight shelter, and we don’t have the room,” he said. “If they haven’t committed a crime, then jail is not the appropriate setting for them.”
Still, Mellinger is trying to find ways to assist his mentally ill inmates by helping them receive treatment, providing training for his staff and that of other departments, and planning for better facilities.
“We are actually enrolling inmates in Medicaid in the hopes that when they leave jail, some of their problems can be solved and they won’t come back to visit us,” he said.
Though he doesn’t have the budget to designate a mental health liaison, as some other agencies do, Mellinger has applied for a grant that would pay for one full-time mental health professional to be assigned to the jail. Late last year, he also hosted a 40-hour NAMI training course he hopes to offer annually to law enforcement officers throughout the county.
“We’ve already had some cases where the training has helped,” he said.
If national statistics are to be believed, he said, on any given day, 35 of the Madison County Jail’s 207 beds are occupied by someone with a severe mental disorder.
However, the jail has one padded cell and seven additional cells designated to segregate those with mental health issues from the rest of the jail population. Mellinger said.
“Sometimes, those designations have to be disregarded because we don’t have the room,” he said.
One of Mellinger’s current priorities is preparing for the construction of a new jail facility. Housing ideally would include about 50 cells for those with a severe mental illness, he said.
“We’re in a crisis between now and the time we get a new jail built,” he said. That, he added, is four to seven years away.
Shifting the burden
The biggest problem, most local experts said, is the state’s shift from caring for people with severe mental illnesses in institutions to freeing them and allowing them to fend for themselves.
“You save money from the expenses that were for the outlay of the hospitals, but now you make that a criminal justice problem,” said Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings. “For many of those people, we are caring for them, just in a different format, through the DOC.”
The mentally ill have the right to decide whether they will accept treatment and take their medications, Cummings and others said. Many refuse outright, but in some instances, people take their medications for a while then decide they feel better and don’t need them any more.
That’s where Cummings said he makes a distinction in how he will treat a defendant.
“That adds to the culpability, from my point of view, for your actions,” he said.
In some instances, Cummings said, he’s willing to allow a lesser punishment depending on the defendant’s understanding between right and wrong.
“That’s something where we might let the mental health professionals play a greater role,” he said.
But if the case involves a violent offense such as murder, he added, there must be a consequence that includes prison time regardless of the defendant’s mental health status.
“It’s possible to be guilty but mentally ill. That’s an option as well,” he said. “If it’s serious enough, it doesn’t mean anything except that they get treatment.”
Mental Health Court
One solution is coming through Madison County’s Problem Solving Courts, specifically the Mental Health Court, which couples intensive treatment and social support with strict judicial supervision.
Those participating in the program are assigned a case manager who coordinates and monitors their progress. Participants meet twice monthly with their assigning judge.
“The purpose is as an option to prison,” said Chris Lanane, coordinator for the Problem Solving Courts.
To be eligible for the program, offenders must have an official mental health diagnosis, a felony-level offense and potential prison exposure amounting to at least two years. Violent offenders and those who have committed sex crimes are ineligible, Lanane said.
“We feel like those people are beyond our ability to monitor and maintain safety in the community,” he said.
Established in 2007, there are 13 participants currently in the Mental Health Court program, Lanane said.
The goal, he said, is to create treatment stability and convince offenders that they likely will need lifelong care.
“We need to keep them in the mental health system,” Lanane said.
In 2014, a study by the IUPUI School of Environmental and Public Affairs suggested that mental health courts can reduce criminal recidivism among offers with mental illness. It found that defendants who completed mental health courts were significantly less likely to be rearrested than those who did not finish the process, 39.6 percent versus 74.8 percent.
Though he wasn’t able to provide statistics, Lanane said the Mental Health Court has proven to be relatively effective.
“Our numbers are pretty good in terms of people not re-offending,” he said.