Our View: Treatment, not jail

Half a century ago, people who heard voices or plotted paranoid fantasies were likely to wind up living at Eastern State Hospital. Now they’re much more likely to wander the streets of Spokane and land in the local jail.

In the 1960s Americans became deeply concerned about the state of public mental institutions. Books like Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” raised the public’s consciousness. And facilities such as Eastern began opening their doors and releasing thousands.

The vision then, of mental health programs that could allow patients to live less restricted, richer lives, has never fully come to fruition. While injustices of the old system were corrected, many new horrors were created.

State and local governments never found enough money to give those with mental illnesses the care they need. And where the psychiatric nurses left off in setting limits on irrational behavior, other public servants, particularly police, judges and jailers, were forced to step in.

Last week Spokane-area officials announced welcome news. A group from law enforcement, the courts and the mental health community will spend a year developing a strategic plan. They’ll examine ways to improve the criminal justice system’s dealings with the mentally ill.

The public has become increasingly aware of the issue. The most notable tragedy was the death last year of Otto Zehm, a mentally ill janitor, who died after Spokane police officers tied him down.

Last September, a U.S. Justice Department report showed that 64 percent of Spokane jail inmates displayed symptoms of a mental disorder.

And last week Spokane Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins said, “We face the fact every day that so many of our folks are in jail when they should be on a treatment regimen.”

This new strategic planning process, paid for by a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department, offers new hope for Spokane’s mentally ill.

The criminal justice system, never designed to replace the psychiatric field, sometimes must do just that. For the collective health of our community, police, judges and jailers must work hard to reduce the insanity here, not compound it.