Incarceration of Mentally Ill to Be Probed : Supervisors: Health and law enforcement officials will investigate the use of the County Jail as a facility for psychotic or disturbed people. Edelman also orders review of psychiatric response teams.

The Board of Supervisors moved Tuesday to create a joint panel of mental health and sheriff’s officials to investigate why the Los Angeles County Jail has become a hospital of last resort for thousands of mentally ill people.

Supervisor Ed Edelman also ordered acting mental health Director Francis Dowling to review the performance of his department’s Psychiatric Emergency Teams (PET), which are summoned by police when they are confronted with psychotic and disturbed suspects.

Edelman said the teams are not functioning properly and, as a result, hundreds of people who might be diverted to treatment programs are placed in jail.

“To put people in County Jail takes manpower, takes money and bed space,” Edelman said. “The sheriff asks for money for prisons and we find the money because that’s ‘law enforcement.’ But when it comes to the mentally ill . . . we don’t seem to find the money.”

The Times reported this week that a record number of mentally ill men and women are entering the criminal justice system because the county’s community mental health system has been ravaged by years of fiscal austerity.

On any given day, more than 3,000 psychotic and emotionally disturbed people are in the County Jail and mental health officials and professionals commonly refer to it as “the nation’s largest mental institution.”

Advocates for the mentally ill called on Los Angeles County officials to take the lead in establishing programs that will keep disturbed and emotionally troubled people out of the criminal justice system.

“All of our major cities in this country have this problem,” said Laurie M. Flynn, executive director of the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill. “People are walking around in active states of delusion and hallucination. They are arrested only for being mentally ill. The jail is not set up for long-term treatment and that is what these people need.”

State Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), head of the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, testified Tuesday before the Board of Supervisors on the crisis in mental health care.

“Essentially, we are re-creating (in the jail system) the asylum of long days ago by abandoning efforts to provide compassionate treatment,” Watson told the board.

Supervisor Gloria Molina introduced a measure that suggested diverting $730,000 allocated for new furniture in mental health department offices to the reopening of the Crisis Evaluation Unit at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk.

Closed earlier this year, the Crisis Evaluation Unit treated hundreds of people with acute illnesses. In all, budget cuts in recent years have eliminated services for up to 30,000 mentally ill people.

“It is clear to many of us that if we don’t get assistance for these people, they’re going to end up in the criminal justice system, where it’s going to cost us more money (to treat them),” Molina said.

Edelman said he agreed that it would be cheaper to provide the mentally ill with community-based treatment than to incarcerate them in the county’s already crowded and dangerous jail system.

County officials said it costs at least $100 per day to house inmates in the mental health modules of the Men’s Central Jail, many times the cost of care at community outpatient treatment centers.

“You can do therapy with someone for $50 a session, once or twice a week,” said Guido De Rienzo, a staff representative of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose members include county mental health workers. “It’s absolutely morally repugnant that we’re putting these people in jail.”

In arguing for increased funding for the county’s Psychiatric Emergency Teams, Watson cited the Aug. 13 shooting of Keith Hamilton, a Ladera Heights man and former mental patient. Hamilton was killed by sheriff’s deputies after his mother called authorities to report that he was yelling and acting bizarre.

Sheriff’s officials and police say that they often don’t bother to call the PET teams because they are slow to respond.

Dowling agreed that the PET teams are often ineffective. He said that although seven PET teams are operating during working hours, they usually take longer than an hour to respond to calls.

“Depending on what’s happening in the situation, 60 to 90 minutes can be a lifetime,” Dowling said.

Dowling noted that even when PET teams respond quickly, they often cannot find facilities for those they are called to help.

“Why don’t we build a hospital?” Edelman asked rhetorically of the mental health chief. After all, the supervisor added, the Sheriff’s Department had found money in the budget for jail expansion projects.

The Task Force on the Incarcerated Mentally Ill, proposed by Edelman, would also include the county’s chief administrative officer, the public defender and one appointee from each supervisor’s office. The full Board of Supervisors is expected to approve its creation next week. Edelman asked that the task force complete its report within 120 days.

“People are ill, out on the street and back in jail again,” said Supervisor Deane Dana. “We’ve got to do something about it.”