Mentally ill inmates number in thousands
When 19-year-old Bryan Kim goes to prison for life for murdering his parents, he’ll join 2,300 other seriously mentally ill inmates in the Washington state prison system – and about 300,000 nationwide.
Most are there for three reasons: a national policy of “deinstitutionalization” since the 1960s that has shut down 90 percent of the psychiatric beds in the nation while failing to create quality community care; a get-tough crime policy that makes it harder for defendants to claim mental illness during their trials; and state budget cuts that have made prisons and jails de facto mental hospitals.
“The mentally ill go to prison like everyone else. The picture we always get of their fate is a pretty dismal one,” said Spokane County Public Defender John Rodgers, whose office represented Kim in his trial.
A leading advocate for the mentally ill said he’s deeply troubled that Kim will end up behind bars for life.
“We are the only advanced society in the world that punishes the mentally ill by sending them to prison. I don’t see a whole lot happening yet to change that,” said Gordon Bopp, of Spokane, state president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Although Washington’s prisons get higher marks than many others, a blue-ribbon council appointed last year by Gov. Chris Gregoire concluded that the system for incarcerating the mentally ill in state prisons is broken. In June, the Statewide Council of Mentally Ill Offenders proposed a plan to divert many mentally ill inmates out of jails and prisons by 2017, with initial funding by next year. It emphasizes early intervention – before people are sucked into the criminal justice system, tried and sentenced.
Seeking an alternative
One of the council members is Spokane County Superior Court Judge Tari Eitzen – the judge who sentenced Kim on Thursday after a jury delivered aggravated first-degree murder verdicts in the 2006 deaths of his parents, Richard and Terri Kim. The verdicts meant a life sentence for Kim with no possibility of parole.
Eitzen, a former social worker, said she couldn’t comment directly on Kim’s fate, but she agreed to speak generally on what happens to people like him.
“When someone with a mental health problem is convicted, most end up in Department of Correction hands. The council is looking at how these offenders are being taken care of,” Eitzen said.
The problem of the incarcerated mentally ill is growing, Eitzen added, noting that 60 percent to 75 percent of the people booked into the Spokane County Jail have diagnosable mental illnesses.
“If we came up with a better alternative, we’d spend half the money we’re spending now. It would have a significant impact on our prison populations,” Eitzen added.
Kim will be sent first to Shelton, Wash., where all new prisoners are processed, said Thomas Saltrup, behavioral health director for the Washington State Department of Corrections. Saltrup heads Gregoire’s council on mentally ill offenders and was a program director of Eastern State Hospital’s legal offender unit, for people committed to the mental hospital after being adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity.
There are about 15,000 inmates in Washington state’s prisons, and about 2,300 – roughly 15 percent – of those inmates are mentally ill. Of those, 1,200 to 1,500 have been determined to be seriously mentally ill with psychoses and other conditions, Saltrup said.
A Department of Justice report released last fall gave an even higher estimate, saying that 46 percent of all state prison inmates and 64 percent of inmates in local jails have a diagnosable mental disorder.
Kim will be evaluated
Prisoners younger than 18 are kept in a separate facility isolated from older offenders, but that won’t apply to Kim, who turns 20 in May.
Saltrup said he’ll request a thorough report by prison psychiatrists on Kim’s mental illness, including a review of his psychiatric records from Sacred Heart Medical Center, where he was hospitalized after earlier violent outbursts against his parents. He’ll also be evaluated for his general aggressiveness and vulnerability – his likelihood of being preyed on by other inmates.
Kim could end up in Monroe’s Special Offender Unit, an inpatient mental health program, Saltrup said. He could be placed in a single or a double cell, or even in protective custody.
The primary focus for mentally ill inmates is to “get them stable on their medications so their stay in prison has some productivity and some meaning,” Saltrup said. “We want to get them back into the general population and not be in inpatient beds longer than needed,” he added.
Prison is not a proper clinical environment for someone like Kim, although there is better management of medications than there used to be, Bopp said.
Dr. Michael Arambula, the Texas psychiatrist who evaluated Kim as bipolar for the Spokane County Public Defender’s Office, said if Kim were to be put in with the general prison population, “he’d just be eaten up alive. He’d be raped and beaten up and God knows what.” Arambula has testified at several trials nationwide involving children who kill their parents.
Kim belongs in a special unit for people with mental illness, said Arambula, a former member of the Texas Council for People with Mental Impairments. Despite its reputation as a law-and-order state and a frequent user of the death penalty, Texas is trying to divert the mentally ill away from prisons to facilities where they can be treated and stabilized, he said.
Alternatives to incarceration for the mentally ill are also being discussed in Spokane County.
A consultant hired by Spokane County commissioners to evaluate the county’s criminal justice system as it plans for a new jail released a report this month that recommends a new mental health court for felony defendants. Spokane County District Court already has a similar court for misdemeanor offenders.
It’s time to take a new, proactive approach to the care and treatment of the mentally ill, Bopp said.
“The fundamental problem in cases such as Bryan Kim’s is untreated mental illness, like in the Virginia Tech shootings. Until we get people into treatment, we’ll continue to have these horrendous incidents,” he said.