FRAMINGHAM
-- Short in stature and smelling of alcohol, a man well known to police
told Sarah Abbott-Carr he hated God and the devil and refused to help
her gauge his mental state.
With a rap sheet spanning more than two decades and 122 arrests for
trespassing, threats, disorderly conduct, public drinking and assault,
the man has returned yet again to a jail cell for what he believes
was "asking someone the time."
The man, whose name is less important than his story, is one of the
many people being helped by a new program aimed at keeping people
with mental illness from serving unnecessary jail time.
"We would never have known him because he just kept getting arrested,"
said Abbott-Carr. "Now we're seeing people for the first time
who have been getting arrested for 25 years. It's amazing to me what
a fundamental gap was open for so long."
In the six months since April, when Abbott-Carr began directing the
Jail Diversion Program, a joint venture between Advocates Inc. and
the Framingham Police Department, Abbott-Carr and her colleagues have
responded to 347 calls where the person committing a crime was thought
to have a mental illness.
Half of those calls were for psychiatric evaluations, and of those,
47 were diverted from jail to treatment.
Most of the calls are for public disturbances, people who are paranoid
and are hearing or seeing things or are a nuisance.
The Jail Diversion Program is designed to keep jails from substituting
for institutions. Until the program started, police often had few
avenues to help a person with a mental illness in distress.
Framingham Police Sgt. Paul Shastany said cops are not experts in
assessing what is a committable behavior and do not want to step in
and do someone else's work.
"We're addressing the causes, not the symptoms," Shastany
said. "The symptoms have in the past shown themselves as crimes."
Police knew little about how the mental health system worked and mental
health clinicians like Abbott-Carr weren't aware how many people with
mental illness were cycling through jails.
Nationally, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 men and women in
U.S. prisons have mental disorders, including such serious illnesses
and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, according
to an October report by the Human Rights Watch, an independent worldwide
group based in New York City that investigates human rights violations.
Jack Hagenbuch, program coordinator at Wayside Youth and Family Services,
a partner in the diversion program, said as psychiatric hospitals
close and there are fewer inpatient treatment facilities, more people
with mental illness are being stabilized and released.
"I think we're going to see more and more people with mental
illness coming into contact with police, human service agencies,"
he said.
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Hagenbuch said
with people receiving less inpatient care, many are going off medications
or are in need and it's important for police to be able to recognize
mental illness and intervene before a person is arrested.
Up until April, police officers and mental health workers did not
coordinate treatment of the mentally ill but operated as two separate
entities.
"The two didn't talk," said Abbott-Carr. "We spoke
different languages. Now we have a common language and a common
sense of humor."
Police have been trained how to recognize mental illness, how to
respond to people with mental illness and speak to them, as well
as what not to do. Cops have been instructed not to blare sirens,
flash lights or use unnecessary force when dealing with people who
might be mentally ill because it only aggravates the situation.
At the same
time, mental health workers like Abbott-Carr have been trained in
hostage negotiation techniques and the workings of the criminal
justice system. Sometimes the arrest of a person with mental illness
cannot be avoided, especially in situations where a serious crime
is committed.
Abbott-Carr responds to calls with police and assesses people on
the scene. If appropriate, they are sent to care in the community
rather than jail. In the case of the intoxicated man already jailed
for assaulting a man and asking him for money, she will try to get
him sent to Bridgewater State Hospital under a Section 35, a court-ordered
detoxification program.
Shastany said police in the past have had no option but to arrest
people, which did little to help those with mental illness from
recycling back into the system.
"Policing now is not just locking up bad guys and presenting
evidence," he said. "It doesn't work. We don't want to
keep responding to the same calls if we can prevent them."
Framingham was recently recognized by Gov. Mitt Romney for the Jail
Diversion Program, which is based on a national model.
Recently police
were called to a home where the Board of Health had cited several
code violations. Unable to reach the people in the home, officers
showed up and found deplorable conditions.
There was a dead animal in plain sight in the home, newspapers filling
an entire room of the house, dirt, boxes and clothes left in the
same place for 15 to 20 years. The brother and sister, in their
60s, had lived in the house since childhood.
Shastany said rather than condemn the house, Abbott-Carr's crew
performed an evaluation and found the siblings to be in the early
stages of dementia. They were referred to a psychiatric ward for
geriatric patients and treated for three weeks.
"In the old days, we really would've been hard-pressed to do
something outside of an arrest," said Shastany.
(Michelle Hillman can be reached at 508-626-4447 or mhillman@cnc.com
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