Mentally Ill Kids Incarcerated, Study Finds

Due to a lack of community resources, children as young as 8 are routinely incarcerated in California juvenile detention facilities while awaiting mental health care, according to a House study released Monday.

A report commissioned by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) found that of the 43 juvenile detention facilities responding to a survey, 27 held youths waiting for mental health services outside of the justice system. Eighteen of those institutions held such children between the ages of 8 and 12.

They included both those who committed crimes and those who didn’t but, for example, whose families couldn’t handle them and called police.

“It’s a terrible failure of our healthcare system,” Waxman said. “Incarcerating a child who needs mental health care causes worsening symptoms, risks physical injury to the kids and causes unnecessary expenses to the juvenile justice system. They don’t know how to handle these kids.”

According to the findings, one in eight juvenile detainees in California is waiting for treatment, or more than 250 each night.

The average stay in the detention facility is two months, which is three times longer than the national average.

The cost of housing the youths awaiting mental health services is estimated at $10.8 million a year, the report found.

“Juvenile detention centers are nearly bankrupt in the resources needed to identify children’s mental health problems and provide the level of service needed,” said David Steinhart, a California attorney and director of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program. “Kids arrested and locked up have multiple problems beyond mental health -- including histories of drug abuse and dysfunctional families -- and need help.”

Linda Shelton, who oversees Jane Hahn Juvenile Hall in Willows, said that when youths “go to juvenile hall, if they are receiving mental health services they are stopped. Our institutions are designed to help children involved in criminal activity. They are not psychiatric hospitals.”

Much of the solution to what the report calls “unnecessary incarceration” involves funding for more community-based counseling services, said Susan Burrell, an attorney in San Francisco with the Youth Law Center, a public-interest law firm specializing in issues affecting abused and at-risk children.

“The basic problem is that there aren’t enough mental health services in the community,” she said. “The juvenile justice system becomes a repository for a lot of these kids.”

Burrell said she is hopeful that Proposition 63, which was approved in November and will funnel approximately $800 million a year in taxes on the richest Californians to fund mental health services, will provide some relief.

“The good news now is that we have resources under Proposition 63, and the state is looking carefully at the high-needs populations, including children in juvenile justice facilities,” Steinhart said. “But mental health needs to work with courts in a more organized way, so children who get dumped in the juvenile justice system get the help they need.”

Stephen W. Mayberg, director of California’s Department of Mental Health, emphasized the need for more collaboration between mental health services and the juvenile justice system, which “have different goals and agendas,” he said.

“We need to view children in context of whole, not just that they committed a crime or that they have mental health issues, but seeing both and realizing that and work together,” he said.