The Go-to-Jail Card

When Nancy Carter and four other professional women began meeting five years ago to vent their frustrations about the mental health issues devastating their families, they discovered three things in common: Each of their mentally ill loved ones was an African American in their 20s at the time of their psychotic break, each had been well-educated and upwardly mobile, and each had landed not in a hospital but in a jail facility, notably the Twin Towers, the downtown branch of the Los Angeles County Jail. As a result, Carter, owner of a firm that supplies audiences for television programs, founded an Inglewood chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill along with novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, pharmacist Benita Council, school administrator Jo Helen Graham and physician Lynn Goodloe. We spoke with Carter about her quest to address a local crisis.

What motivated you and your co-founders to start a NAMI chapter in Inglewood?

The perception in all communities is that black people deserve to go to jail, they’re all criminals, they all use drugs. This was not the case with our young people. Our young people were in college, had careers, they all had lives. They would never have encountered the criminal justice system had it not been for their mental illnesses.

You call the Twin Towers in downtown L.A. the nation’s largest de facto mental health facility. What does that mean?

For the year 2004, statistics from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health list 50,534 forensic episodes at the Twin Towers. A “forensic episode” means clients coming through the Twin Towers who have some form of mental illness. The tragedy is not so much the huge number, but the increase from the year 2000. In 2000 that figure was 33,805, so this year represents a 49% increase in four years. That’s ridiculous. African Americans top the list with almost 41%, Latinos come in second at almost 24%. So 65% of the mental health patients incarcerated in the Twin Towers were people of color.

What accounts for the increase?

Thirty years ago we closed state hospitals, and there was a promise from state government that more community clinics would be opened. That promise was never realized. As a result, everyone poured out of state hospitals onto the streets. Homeless people commit petty crimes, mentally ill people traditionally get in trouble with law enforcement, and instead of being sent to treatment facilities that no longer exist they end up being sent to jail.

Is the problem worse for people of color?

I don’t think that mental health problems have been more serious for African Americans or minorities than for any other population, we just seem to be punished more severely than any other population. If you are a Caucasian and you are walking down Rodeo Drive naked and talking to yourself, you will be picked up by the Beverly Hills Police Department and taken to Cedars-Sinai or UCLA. If you are a person of color and you are walking down Crenshaw naked and talking with yourself, you get the “Go Straight to Jail” card.

What would address this problem in a meaningful way?

We need more housing for the mentally ill, and more facilities where people can be transitioned from arrest to treatment. We seriously need a “jail diversion” program placing more mental health court workers in court who can work with public defenders and district attorneys to divert people from going through the jail process.

Tell us about your own work on the issue.

We’re not going to change the system overnight, but since so many of our family members end up over at the Twin Towers jail, we went to Sheriff’s Cmdr. Marc Klugman and sat down and said, “Can we do something to change the culture at the jail?” We had very successful meetings with him and accomplished several things: First, we now have on the Sheriff’s Department website a link that will take you to a document walking you through steps to take if your family member has been arrested. The second thing was a medication form. We now have a designated fax line, a form that people can pick up in the lobby or download off their computers on who their family members are, who to contact, what medication they are on, who the doctor was, and they can get that into the jail. Third was convincing the folks at the jail to allow us to start a training program for the deputies.

What drives you to juggle your career with a volunteer commitment that can amount to 40-plus hours a week?

I believe in love and that as human beings we are obligated to treat others as we would want to be treated. Suffering with a loved one with mental illness has completely changed me. Mental illness is a marathon, not a sprint. No one can bear the burden alone. It really does take “the village”--plus.