Program Gets the Mentally Ill Out of Jail

Melina Kaulukukui is a county clinical psychologist who has been making a small dent in the population at the Orange County Jail by finding other facilities for some inmates who show signs of mental illness.

But the tough part for Kaulukukui is that most of the inmates she deals with would rather stay in jail than accept her help.

“When you are in a mental health program, you are expected to get better,” Kaulukukui said. “In jail, no expectations are made. No one puts any demands on you to improve.”

ACT Program

Kaulukukui is head of a county program approved by the Board of Supervisors last June called the Alternative Community Treatment Program (ACT). Her job is to help remove some mentally ill inmates from the jail environment, under court approval, and place them in treatment programs, either as outpatients or in an institution.

On Thursday, the county’s Health Care Agency, which administers the program, sent a report to the board stating that 29 inmates have been helped since the program began. Only six of the 29 have been arrested again, according to the report. Officials estimate that the program has saved 691 days in jail for the 29 people.

Dr. Nan Cervantes, who oversees the program, said that health officials hope to keep mentally ill inmates who have a history of arrests for minor offenses from being re-arrested. But Kaulukukui adds that one gauge of progress might be if the program can simply reduce the number of times that some of these people are re-arrested.

The goal of the program was to aid 35 mentally ill inmates by the end of the first year, and to save 900 jail days. But the report states that more than 50 will probably be in the program by the end of the first year.

County health officials are pleased with those figures, especially considering that they are getting little cooperation from the inmates they handle.

Jail Is ‘Normal’

“There is a stigma attached to being mentally ill,” Cervantes said. “To them, jail is better, because being a criminal is still being normal. Going to a mental health facility is being abnormal.”

Kaulukukui said most of the inmates she deals with deny that they have a mental health problem. A majority of them are transients, and all but a few are men, she added.

Their most frequent offenses are trespassing, being drunk in public, not paying restaurant bills and petty theft.

Not all those arrested on such charges are referred to the ACT program. Most who are referred to ACT have already been screened by a mental health team at the jail, or are referred to the program by judges or attorneys.

“The inmates we treat do not belong in jail; they belong where they can get help,” Cervantes stressed.

That help might be at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, the acute care clinic at Western Medical Center in Anaheim, or at the Anaheim Therapeutic Residential Center.