Reaching to the Mentally Ill

Today the Assembly Health Committee will consider a measure that would provide outreach programs to mentally ill homeless people. By approving the bill, legislators can bring some sanity back to the way California treats seriously impaired people, who should be sent into treatment instead of prison.

Most liberal and conservative criminologists and law enforcement officials have come to agree that the $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion that California spends each year arresting, trying and incarcerating people with serious mental illnesses mostly is wasted. The individuals with these conditions go untreated and crime rates in this population go unchanged. Public safety is compromised by an insidious cycle of arrest and release without diagnoses, medications or follow-up care.

Common sense should push legislators toward approving the bill that is before the committee. The measure, by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), has good, conservative safeguards to prevent money from being squandered on glorified welfare entitlements. The state Department of Mental Health would award grants only to counties that based their programs on successful models like Long Beach’s The Village, a community mental health center that treated 276 people last year, doubling the percentage of those working and living independently and increasing sevenfold the number taking their medications.

The bill also rejects the punishing notion that people should be assisted only after they assume “personal responsibility” and seek help. Recognizing that the seriously mentally ill are not the sort of folks who show up at a social services agency and ask for career advice, the bill calls for programs that gain people’s trust through weeks or months of repeated conversations, interventions with police, free meals and rides to the mental health clinic.

Should Steinberg’s bill pass the Assembly Health Committee today, as expected, then Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), the powerful head of the state Appropriations Committee, will have to scrounge up its first-year budget of $50 million. The bill says the programs should finance themselves from a 20% reduction in imprisonment costs within four years. If that does not happen, the legislation would allow the programs to be scrapped or taken over by the prison system. The bill is a cost-effective alternative to locking up the mentally ill and a reasonably priced contribution to public safety.