Father’s Anguish

Martin J. Pollak is so mentally ill and so deeply in trouble that his father refuses to bail the Ventura man out of jail.

Convicted of two relatively minor felonies, Pollak is ill enough to commit a third and risk a life prison sentence under California’s “three strikes” law, says Norman Pollak.

So now, 38-year-old Martin Pollak, afflicted since age 17 with schizoaffective disorder and depression--and more recently addicted to crack cocaine, according to court records--waits in the Todd Road Jail near Santa Paula.

He is to be sentenced Aug. 14 for breaking probation and stealing a man’s wallet off a restaurant table, his father says.

And Norman Pollak listens by phone as the son he loves--the son who had his bar mitzvah at 13 and was a Boy Scout and model student until he fell ill--cries and pleads and threatens to commit suicide.

“He started talking about, ‘You’ve got to get me out, you’ve got to get me out, Dad,’ ” says Norman Pollak, a retired Westlake certified public accountant.

“He’s been in there eight months, and he’s going crazy. The reason I didn’t bail him out was I did not want him to be in a position where he’s capable of a third strike.”

Martin Pollak’s predicament is all too common, mental health advocates say.

Mentally ill people sometimes shun the prescription drugs that keep them well because of unpleasant side effects.

Illness seeps in again, and they turn to street drugs or alcohol to combat feelings of depression, anxiety, psychosis and mania.

And some of them break the law--intentionally or not--and wind up in jail, says Patricia Sandwall, a member of the Ventura County chapter of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

“To lump [Martin Pollak] into another category with people who are ‘normal’ and commit felony crimes, and then sentence [him] to a lifetime in jail when he’s really just ill, it’s just not fair,” Sandwall says. “It’s not right.”

And there may be more cases like Pollak’s, as the June 30 closure of Camarillo State Hospital squeezes more patients into programs in the larger community, Sandwall says.

As many as 65 of Ventura County’s 1,300 jail inmates at any one time are mentally ill, says Sheriff’s Capt. Keith Parks, who oversees the custody division.

“They’ve been arrested because they’ve been charged, they’ve been held over [for trial] and they’re in our system because they could not make bail,” Parks says. “We’re here strictly as custodians to keep them as they serve their sentences or await court dates.”

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Martin Pollak was managing his illness fairly well with drugs and psychotherapy until about three years ago, according to court records.

That’s when he first tried crack cocaine, which clashed with his psychiatric drugs, and led him into trouble, says Norman Pollak.

In 1995, Martin Pollak brandished a butter knife at his longtime girlfriend and stole from her a $12 bus pass and a VCR valued at $100--a crime that earned him a robbery conviction, court records show.

The probation report said he committed the robbery “in a manner that demonstrated no criminal sophistication or professionalism” and noted he did not injure the woman. The report also cited his mental illness, his participation in treatment programs for schizophrenia and drug abuse, his lack of a criminal record.

The judge sentenced Pollak to five years’ probation.

The second felony strike came Oct. 8, according to court records: Martin Pollak was living at Shamrock House, a clean-and-sober boardinghouse, but he had just spent six days at Vista Del Mar Hospital as an inpatient.

He left the hospital, went to the bank, paid his rent and ran into a friend, and the two used cocaine together, according to court papers.

Shortly after 7 p.m., he walked into a Ventura restaurant and grabbed a man’s wallet off a table. The man tried to grab it back. A struggle ensued, and the victim and several other patrons wrestled Pollak down and held him until police arrived.

They read him his Miranda rights, but he confessed to the robbery and was arrested, court records show.

The victim suffered a small cut to his thumb, but was able to retrieve his wallet, holding $30 and credit cards.

A jury convicted Pollak of his second robbery charge, carrying a possible sentence of up to 12 years.

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Ever since, Pollak has been awaiting sentencing in Ventura County’s jail system--first in the Ventura County Jail, then at Todd Road Jail near Santa Paula.

At first, he was extremely ill because jail psychiatrists were giving him drugs other than the Lithium, Sinequan and Prozac prescribed by his doctors, his father says.

And Martin Pollak threatened suicide several times in a phone call in late June, complaining that he was suffering “inhuman treatment” and had been put in solitary confinement because he called a guard an obscene name, his father says.

The younger Pollak has told his father that he only wants to get out of jail and into a treatment program for his mental illness and drug addiction.

“I cried, and I told him that I love him,” Norman Pollak recalls. “I was feeling totally devastated.”

Jail officials confirm that Martin Pollak committed a disciplinary violation and was put on a 21-day suspension of commissary and visitation privileges until July 5.

They also say he is housed in a single cell in the Todd Road Jail’s psychiatric ward, and that he has been receiving proper treatment for his mental illness.

But they declined to give details on his medication.

“Our purpose is to ensure [mentally ill inmates] remain in good health to go to court or serve their sentence,” Parks says. “Our professional medical staff do that very ably.”

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Neither Pollak’s public defender nor the prosecutor on his robbery case would comment on his upcoming sentencing.

But mental health advocates say that in an ideal world, community-based mental health programs would work, Camarillo State would remain open to help severely ill patients and people like Martin Pollak would not be in jail.

“Some of these people can clearly be picked up [by police] because they’re a danger to themselves or others,” says Lou Matthews, a member of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

“We don’t want to get back to locking everybody up” who is mentally ill, Matthews says. “But we ought to treat people who clearly cannot make that decision for themselves and don’t recognize their need for care and refuse treatment. . . . It happens all too often that they wind up in jail or . . . dead.”