Fix the ‘Pickle Factory’

This week, as television cameras zoom in on celebrities ladling Thanksgiving gravy to lines of street people at Los Angeles rescue missions, consider a story Mayor James K. Hahn tells.

He was leading a Chinese delegation around the grounds of City Hall when a visitor inquired about one of the many seemingly deranged, often filthy people who sleep on sidewalks or in bushes in the shadows of the Civic Center’s city, county, state and federal office buildings. Hahn offered his guest an impromptu lesson on why a democracy must value individuals’ right to make free choices. When he was done speaking, the Chinese delegate looked again at the man sleeping on the sidewalk and said, not just to Hahn but figuratively to all Americans: We think you don’t know what to do or don’t care.

If there is one thing that liberal advocates for the “homeless” and conservative critics of “bums” agree upon, it’s that America’s streets should never have become bedrooms to so many of its citizens. Los Angeles has public and private organizations that provide food and places to stay for people temporarily down on their luck. But the region fails the majority of the people who, year in, year out, sleep on city and suburban sidewalks, behind hedges and under freeway overpasses. Most of those have mental illnesses, addictions or both.

This benign neglect must end, for the sake of the sick who live in squalid conditions, and for the sake of the well who pay a high economic and civic price for ignoring the problem.

Society used to lock up “lunatics,” subjecting people with such diseases as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder to involuntary brain surgery, shock treatment or sterilization. Such treatment was shameful. But life on the streets is anything but humane. It’s time that we all squarely face the fact that some people who cannot act in their own best interests must be nudged off the streets and into treatment even when they don’t think they need it.

Who among us has not walked past or stepped over a person sprawled in the middle of the sidewalk, hair matted, ranting? Do we hand him cash or avert our eyes? Too many of us see these lost souls as part of an intractable problem. But the last decade has produced ways to help these people live healthier and more productive lives, while returning public sidewalks to the uses they were made for--walking and legitimate commerce.

Los Angeles’ jails are full of mentally ill people arrested for nuisance crimes: stealing, vagrancy, fighting, trespassing. When they finish their time, they recycle back to the only place they know to go--the public street. “Mental health” courts are a new--some say revolutionary--approach that recognizes that for more than 30 years judges have been wasting taxpayers’ money by simply slamming mentally ill lawbreakers behind bars without offering the kind of help their diseases demand.

In several cities nationwide such “problem-solving” courts have begun to undo the catastrophe that began here in 1957 when California passed a measure known as the Short-Doyle Act. It was one of the first in a series of state and national measures that emptied public mental hospitals, leading to a drop from 550,000 institutionalized patients in 1955 to 60,000 today. The idea, which gained momentum over the next 15 years, was to take advantage of new psychiatric medications that were supposed to free the mentally ill from oppressive psychiatric “snake pits.” Policymakers opined that these medicated patients would thrive if liberated to cheaper and less restrictive settings in their own neighborhoods. But little of the promised money materialized, and far too many of the psychologically wounded wound up on the streets, where illicit drugs were far easier to get than the prescription kind.

Ever since, many of these people have been caught in a cycle: Mental disease, often coupled with addiction, lands them on the street, where they wind up in regular confrontation with police--usually for minor crimes that get them jailed or hospitalized and finally dumped back in the environment they couldn’t cope with in the first place. Mental health courts can ease people off that hamster wheel.

But that’s not happening the way it ought to in Los Angeles. A decomposing, nearly 100-year-old former pickle factory in Cypress Park is the major local version of mental health court. Judge Harold Shabo ably manages it with a feeble budget. Now the people who wield clout and divvy up the cash that pays for courts--primarily state and county judicial administrators--should assign themselves an immediate field trip to San Bernardino, where a full-fledged mental health court has been up and running successfully since 1999.

Here’s what they would see: judge, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers and psychologists working together to keep the mentally ill and drug-addicted on their prescribed medications, off street drugs, in housing and on track toward leading sane, sober, law-abiding lives.

Men and women stand one by one before Judge Patrick Morris, who alternates between his roles as Judge Judy and Oprah. Last Wednesday, for instance, a husky man with tattooed arms wept as he told the judge about “the stress” that makes methamphetamine a continuing temptation. The judge, like a father the man probably never had, told him that everyone has good days and bad days. Then Morris directed the former car thief to stay off drugs: “The alternative is jail or prison.” The tattooed man chose treatment.

Inefficient? Mollycoddling? Wrong. The state pays more than $500 million a year just to house mentally ill lawbreakers in jails and prison. Morris sums up what makes his court different: “We use the powers of the court to effect change--we don’t just pass along problems to others.”

Take note, Los Angeles: Mental health court is one way to stop the revolving door that keeps pushing the mentally ill back onto the streets.

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Monday: How a cop and a nurse team up to lure people from their cardboard condos.