Horrific Deaths Brutal Treatment Mental Illness in Americas Jails

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Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s

jails
A comprehensive Virginian-Pilot investigation
By Gary A. Harki
The Virginian-Pilot
Aug 23, 2018 Updated Aug 27, 2018
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Investigation tracks hundreds of deaths

Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar
disorder, baked to death in a jail cell at Rikers Island in New York after being arrested
for trespassing.
David O'Quin was arrested for

disturbing the peace in Louisiana. His
father pleaded in vain to jail officials
for him to be given his medications for
severe mental disorders. Less than two
weeks later, O'Quin died from a
bacterial infection after his own
https://pilotonline.com/news/local/projects/jail-crisis/article_5ba8a112-974e-11e8-ba17-b7... 8/29/2018
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excrement got into cuts that he

received from being beaten and put in
a restraint chair.
Jennifer Towle was suffering from

depression so severe she started eating
a nail clipper, milk cartons and other
objects while jailed in New Jersey.
After she died, an autopsy found about
three liters of such material in her
stomach.
People with mental illnesses in jails

around the country are routinely dying
in horrific ways and under
preventable circumstances, a
Virginian-Pilot investigation has found.
The country’s 3,000-plus jails are the

default treatment center for many.
There is often nowhere else to take them.
Alex Driehaus | The Virginian-Pilot Buy Now

An inmate watches TV in a housing pod where many inmates with mental illness are kept at the Hampton Roads
Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va., on Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018.
The Pilot and students from Marquette University in Milwaukee tracked 404 deaths
since 2010 in what experts say is the most comprehensive effort to examine what
happens to people with mental illness in jails throughout the country. The findings
were compiled using state data, news reports, existing databases and court filings.
The total number of deaths for the period is likely significantly higher than what could
be documented through available records.
The same grim patterns emerge again and again:
• At least 41 percent of those who died were in isolation or recently had been. Solitary
confinement has long been known to exacerbate the symptoms of mental illnesses.
• 44 percent of the deaths were by suicide, which can often be prevented with close
monitoring.
• In 70 cases, inmates were shocked with a Taser or stun gun, pepper-sprayed or restrained
– often in some combination – before dying.
• In at least 11 percent of the cases, family or friends warned the jail that their loved one had a
mental illness. In at least six of those, they tried to bring the correct medications to the jail.
Without medications and proper treatment, someone with a disease like schizophrenia can
rapidly decline. It’s not uncommon for such inmates to wind up in isolation, naked and
smearing feces around their cell.
For years, sheriffs, mental health advocates, families and prosecutors have sounded
the alarm about the number of people with illnesses such as bipolar disorder,
schizophrenia and severe depression who are sent to jail, often for minor crimes.
Unlike prisons, which house those convicted of and sentenced for a crime, jails must
take in anyone arrested – including those in the throes of a mental-health crisis.
“We are arresting people who have no idea what the laws are or the rules are because
they're off their medications,” said Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall, a vice president of the
National Sheriffs’ Association. “You'd never arrest someone for a heart attack, but
you're comfortable arresting someone who is diagnosed mentally ill. No other country
in the world is doing it this way.”
In addition to causing pain and suffering for people with mental illness, the practice is
costing municipalities millions.
At least 53 percent of the deaths examined have resulted in a lawsuit. Combined, the
cases have cost municipalities at least $145 million. The true cost is much higher – in
many cases, lawsuits are still pending and in others the settlement amount is secret.
The figures also do not take into account lawyers’ fees.
These are the people with mental illness who have died in America's jails
Examining how people with mental illness die in jail is key to understanding how the
criminal justice system treats them in the United States, said Elizabeth Sinclair,
director of research and public affairs for the Treatment Advocacy Center, a mental
health advocacy group based in Arlington.
Sinclair said she sees The Pilot’s research as a step toward making sure the system’s
failure is brought to the public's attention.
“The lack of data collection, the lack of accountability is such a systematic, widespread
issue, and the fact is that this is the only database that has this information available
to people – it points to the fact that if the data doesn’t exist, then they can’t be held
accountable to what’s happening,” she said. “I think people expect the data to be
collected by the criminal justice system, but the reality is, it’s not systematically
collected at any level.
“I see this as a starting point for reform, for finding out why this is happening and
what we need to do to fix it.”
A tragic pattern
Marc Moreno’s death in the Benton County Jail in Washington state fits a pattern
found time and again: A mental health crisis leads to an arrest, which leads to poor
treatment of the illness, which leads to death.
Jessica Moreno was very close to her brother, the baby of the family. They would go
out with friends together during the summer, often swimming or playing soccer. He
was humble, a good kid, she said.
In March 2016, the 18-year-old was having a crisis and his family was afraid he would
hurt himself. Moreno was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which
causes alternating periods of elation and depression.
The Morenos had dealt with such situations before. A history of mental illness runs in
the family.
Marc’s father took him from treatment center to treatment center, looking for a bed so
his son could get help.
Mental health treatment can be hard to come by in the United States. Most facilities
are small and expensive. Finding a bed can be daunting, if not impossible. That often
leaves family members to make sure loved ones with severe mental illness take their
medications and stay out of trouble.
What do you want to know about jails and people with mental illness?
Few people with mental illness who end up in jail are career criminals, said John
Snook, executive director of The Treatment Advocacy Center.
“Really what you are looking at is a clear failure of the mental health system,” he said.
“Very often these people … are booked for the lack of a treatment bed.”
Eventually the Moreno family took Marc to the Benton Franklin Crisis Response Unit
in Kennewick, where someone called the police.
“He was not oriented to time and place, he couldn’t answer basic questions,” said
Edwin Budge, the lawyer for the Moreno family. “It was pretty obvious he was
experiencing a mental health crisis.”
But rather than let him get help, police decided to arrest him March 3 on
misdemeanor charges of driving on a suspended license and failing to transfer the
title to a vehicle within 45 days. Eight days later he was dead.
“I’m talking to angels,” the 18-year-old told the doctor evaluating him at the jail.
After his condition was assessed, Marc was put in a small cell by himself with no toilet
or sink.
“There was a grate on the floor, but it wasn’t sufficient for defecation,” Budge said. He
had no access to water in the cell, no bed, no mattress, no bench.”
Just four walls, the floor and the constant illumination of the overhead lights.
Being locked up in isolation can exacerbate mental illnesses, causing symptoms to

worsen as outside stimulus is reduced to a meal tray shoved through a cell door.
Jail officials often claim they have no other choice: They need to protect the inmate
from the general population and vice versa.
Jessica Moreno said that her father tried to warn the jail that his son needed
treatment, but that the staff did not listen.
In 63 percent of the cases tracked by The Pilot, family members claimed that the jails
had not properly taken care of their loved one.
Day by day, Marc’s condition deteriorated.
On March 5, he was no longer answering questions. On March 6, a doctor noted that

he’d slept less than 30 minutes in the previous two days.
By March 7, the fifth day of his confinement, he was smearing feces on the walls and
rolling on the floor naked. Staff made no effort to get him mental health treatment or
remove him from isolation.
Staff noted on March 10 that Marc had not had food or water for several days. He had
also not been able to appear for a scheduled arraignment in front of a judge.
On March 11, having not had anything to eat or drink for at least six days, Moreno
died in a cell. He was covered in his own waste.
“One of the things I wonder is – what was the plan?” said Budge, who represented
Moreno’s family in a lawsuit that resulted in a $1.2 million settlement. “Who was in
charge? Was there any design for taking care of this young man for the long term or
was it due to the lack of any place to put him that that was where he was going to be?”
Marc Moreno’s death has left a hole in his family’s heart. Jessica Moreno says her
father blames himself for what happened. The grief and guilt in such cases can’t be
quantified.
“We were thinking we were doing the right thing, which was to try to get him help,”
she said. “And in a way we feel, oh, that’s what caused him to die. … What ended up
was him locked up somewhere and left to die.”
At the county level, there seems to be a lack of concern about preventing these types
of deaths, Budge said. His law firm has represented families in similar lawsuits for
more than two decades.
There is always an insurance company, always a payout and never any change.
“It’s the type of thing that people think, ‘Oh maybe this happens in North Korea.
Maybe this happens in Iran.’ But it happens right here,” Budge said. “You can identify
failures on multiple levels, but the long and short of it is that someone needed help.
Instead they were stuck in a jail cell and left to rot.”
Jails: the last resort

How America’s jails came to warehouse the people with mental illness is no secret.
Deinstitutionalization, the release of patients from large institutions, began when

Thorazine started being widely used in the 1950s. The medication was the first
effective antipsychotic drug, calming and sedating people with schizophrenia and
other serious mental illnesses.
By then, the horrific conditions inside America’s mental hospitals were well-known.
“It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness
there are in the world,” Nellie Bly wrote in “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” her 1887 book
on Blackwell's Island Asylum in New York, America’s first municipal mental hospital.
The process of deinstitutionalization sped up rapidly in 1965, when Congress created

Medicaid. The new health program excluded payments to large “institutions for
mental diseases.” That forced the shutdown of mental hospitals across the country
and was designed to create smaller facilities within communities.
Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails | Jailed in Crisis | pil... Page 10 of 21
In 1955, state mental institutions had about 558,000 beds. There were 337 mental
hospital beds per 100,000 people in the United States, according to a 2016 study by the
Treatment Advocacy Center.
Far too few smaller community facilities opened to make up the difference. Today,
there are roughly 12 beds per 100,000 people.
“It is not at all a coincidence that the only illness discriminated from Medicaid funding
is mental illness and that there are so many mentally ill in jails,” said Snook, the
Treatment Advocacy Center director.
Medicaid will only pay for stays in mental-health hospitals that have no more than 16
beds. But facilities that small often can’t survive, Snook said. “They are not big enough
to have economies of scale. So what happens is beds disappear, and you have only
what the state will pay for.”
That leaves people with mental illness few places to go for help. Even obtaining, and
staying on, much-needed medications can be difficult. The drugs can have severe side
effects and may need to be changed over time.
Did we miss a case? Tell us about it.
Weak, fragmented mental health-care systems across the country have so many gaps
that people routinely fall through the cracks, even with family guidance.
“They are looking for anyone to help, and they come up with so few resources. The
mental health system has nothing to offer, social support systems have nothing to
offer,” said Laura Usher, a mental health advocate and the former senior manager for
criminal justice and advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “They are
seen by others as people to be afraid of rather than as friends and neighbors.”
When families can’t find beds or other services, they often have nowhere else to turn
but the police. And in many parts of the country, police have just one option readily
available: jail.
Since the start of deinstitutionalization, jail populations have increased exponentially.

In 1950, American jails held about 86,500 people. By 1983 there were more than
223,500 inmates. In 2016, the last year for which data is available, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics counted more than 740,700, slightly down from the peak of 785,500 in
2008.
The bureau estimates that 44 percent of jail inmates have been told by a mental health
professional that they have a mental disorder. More than a quarter of the jail
population – roughly 186,000 people – are believed to be in serious psychological
distress.
Deinstitutionalization never really happened, said Hall, the Nashville sheriff; the
burden of care simply shifted.
“I tell everybody we just reinstitutionalize these people in a different building,” he

said. Jails are dealing with a population that has needs beyond what the criminal
justice system is able to address.
“It really makes no sense.”
Hall remembered sitting in a National Sheriff’s Association board meeting about three
years ago watching a presentation on a survey that sheriffs had taken to determine
their most pressing issue. Someone had created a word cloud out of the answers. The
biggest phrase by far was “mental health.”
“From Laramie, Wyoming, to Florida to Vermont and in every Southern state and
everywhere else, the number one issue facing sheriffs was mental health,” Hall said.
“It gets the attention of most people in what I call the elected offices in law
enforcement.”
A crisis without data

Still, little in the way of concrete information is being collected about the conditions
people with mental illness endure in jail. Across the country, mental health diagnoses
are seldom reported by jails, which can hold someone anywhere from a few days to
years. In many cases, jails never get a definitive diagnosis.
+2
How states track (and don't track) deaths of jail inmates with mental illness
The Pilot’s investigation includes every death in which there was an indication of
mental illness before the person was arrested. But the 404 deaths counted in the
database are likely a fraction of the true number and only hint at conditions for the
larger population of people with mental illness in jail.
Through a voluntary questionnaire, the federal government counts more than 900 jail
deaths a year in the U.S. but gives few indications of how many of those inmates were
mentally ill. The responses count 522 people who died behind bars after spending a
night in a mental-health facility while in jail custody between 2009 and 2013, the only
years for which data is available. The Justice Department will not release their names
and does not include in its survey any questions to determine whether they had a
mental illness before their arrest.
In most cases, inquiries to state agencies yielded little information. Only eight states
could provide any indication of how many people with mental illness died in their
jails.
For example, about a dozen of the 36 deaths that occurred in a Utah jail, prison or
detention facility in 2013 and 2014 were of people with a mental health problem.
Officials did not break down the statistics further.
In Virginia, the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner examined National Violent
Death Reporting System data at The Pilot’s request to determine whether information
about such deaths could be found there. It provided a report indicating that between
2003 and 2015 about 31 percent of the 709 deaths in custody – which includes deaths
in prisons, in police custody and in foster care, among other circumstances – were of
people with mental-health problems.
Only Texas provided concrete data recording when someone with a mental illness
died in an in-state jail. Officials there say their collection methods have gotten more
accurate in recent years. Still, the numbers are not perfect.
Texas provided a list of 55 deaths of people with mental illness in state jails. The Pilot’s
investigation had already uncovered 36 deaths in the state, but only six of them
overlapped with the Texas data.
Usher called it a “travesty” that months of research went into finding out how people
with mental illness die in jails and that the picture is still so incomplete.
“I don’t think anyone has investigated this as thoughtfully and thoroughly,” she said of
The Pilot’s database. “And I think it shows how far we have to go in treating people
with mental-health conditions with humanity and dignity. It’s also outrageous that
this sort of information, this sort of data is not available publicly. Our jails and our
criminal justice system should be held accountable.”
In October 2019, the Bureau of Justice Assistance will start collecting more accurate
data on deaths in police and jail custody. The collection, which has been long delayed,
was prompted by the 2013 Death in Custody Reporting Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep.
Bobby Scott, D-Newport News.
The bureau also will have the ability to withhold some funding from jails and police
agencies that do not submit their data, likely making it a far more accurate count of
such deaths.
Jails will be asked to submit basic demographic information, as well as the date, time
and location of death, the law enforcement agency involved and a brief description of
the circumstances.
The bureau will not, a Justice Department spokeswoman said, collect any specific
information on whether the person involved was mentally ill.
Scott, who also sponsored the 2013 bill’s predecessor more than two decades earlier,
believes the Justice Department should collect data on mental illness, even if it is just
in the brief description.
“At least start collecting it. Then people can start doing some research,” he said. “The
first step is to get the data. You can review the data and find out what’s happening.
And if it’s suicides, you can look and find out how they committed suicide.”
Without data, Scott said, you don’t know what the problems are. And if you don’t
know what the problems are, you can’t fix them.
“You know, it seems like a little thing,” he said.
One jail at a crossroads

Tucked behind a gas station off Interstate 264 in Portsmouth, the Hampton Roads
Regional Jail looks like a series of oversized gray Lego bricks nestled among the trees.
The scene outside, with its ponds, geese and flagpole is almost serene.
Inside is another matter. Every day, the staff confronts the mental health issues facing
all jails, and then some.
The facility has become the physical and mental health-care jail for Norfolk,
Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton and Newport News – five of Virginia’s largest
municipalities.
The regional jail houses about 1,100 inmates a day. Unlike most jails nationally, which
are run by a sheriff, it is managed by a board of local city managers, sheriffs and city
council members.
A dumping ground for inmates with all kinds of sickness, it is the largest mental
health care center in Virginia.
That has led to tragedy.
In April 2015, Jamycheal Mitchell stole

a soda and snack cake from a 7-Eleven
and ended up in the regional jail.
Mitchell, who was bipolar and
schizophrenic, thought that the store
was owned by his father and that he
could take what he wanted.
A judge ordered him twice to a state

mental hospital so his competency
could be restored and he could stand
trial. Court clerks claim the first order
was lost in the mail on its way to the
hospital. The second was tucked into a
Bill Tiernan | The Virginian-Pilot Buy Now
desk drawer and forgotten.
The cell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail where 24-
year-old Jamycheal Mitchell was found dead Aug. 19, 2015. He
Once, jailers tried to send him to the
had been charged with theft and was awaiting trial.
hospital through an emergency order,
but he was in court when someone
from the local mental health agency arrived and the person never came back.
Through the spring and summer, Mitchell’s condition worsened. He was given no
clothes, only a suicide smock that resembles something between a blanket and a
mattress pad. He complained that his cell was constantly cold. In a moment of lucidity,
he told a fellow inmate that he stood by the small window in his cell door all the time
because he felt some heat there from the overhead light.
Family members said they begged the jail for help for Mitchell but got nowhere.
Mitchell clogged his toilet, which caused it to overflow, leading jailers to shut off his
water.
Inmates in isolation often flood their cells. Doing so is one of the few ways they can
influence their environment.
Mitchell’s feet swelled from constant pacing.
On Aug. 19, 2015, three months after he was first ordered to a mental hospital,
Mitchell died alone in his cell with feces on the walls and urine on the floor. The
official cause of death was “wasting disease.”
He is one of 71 inmates with schizophrenia or bipolar disease counted by The Pilot’s

database to have died alone in a cell since 2010.
A Justice Department investigation and a lawsuit are still pending in the case.
Since Mitchell’s death, the jail has also received a grant of nearly a million dollars to
help with staffing for mental health care workers. New management has worked hard
to prevent more deaths in the jail and to care for people with mental illness housed
there.
“I think it’s fair to say with the leadership having left, with the Department of Justice
investigating, with the number of lawsuits, there was definitely a crisis. The
community did not trust the jail,” said Linda Bryant, who spent more than a year as
the facility’s assistant superintendent following Mitchell’s death.
The staff there now – most of whom are longtime employees – do care about doing a
good job, Bryant said. They realize their work is more about responding to and
preventing crises than about meting out punishment.
But they routinely find themselves in impossible situations.
A social worker at the jail had to press charges against a severely mentally ill inmate
who masturbated whenever he saw her.
An inmate who took a bedsheet and climbed atop a basketball backboard had to be
talked out of killing himself.
A man taking medications for depression so severe that he was nearly catatonic had to
be watched carefully once the drugs started working. Now that he had more energy
he could move around, which meant he might try to kill himself.
Each morning, high-level staff

members – jail and mental health
professionals – start by studying a
whiteboard of their sickest inmates.
Their goal is to make it to the next day
with everyone alive.
It is a daunting task, especially with

chronic staff shortages.
In December, Jonathan Ellis tied a

sheet to the end of his bedpost and
killed himself. Ronaldo Myers, the
superintendent at the time, said there
Alex Driehaus | The Virginian-Pilot Buy Now simply weren’t enough staff members
A cell door stands open in a housing pod where
keeping eyes on inmates.
many inmates with mental illness are kept at the Hampton
Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va., on Thursday, Aug. 16,
Myers asked the legislature for an
2018.
additional $5 million for 31 permanent
and 50 temporary positions.
In March the General Assembly rejected the funding increase.
Myers left his job by the end of the month.
The new superintendent has not asked the five cities to increase funding to pay for the
positions. The jail has hired people, reducing the number of unfilled jobs from 36 in
January to nine in August. Officials have also converted some support positions that
had been staffed by sworn officers to civilian, freeing up more than a dozen officers to
work directly with inmates.
In January, Myers made the case in an interview that Mitchell’s death had raised
awareness of the jail’s needs.
“The eyes are open. Now there are some dollars that need to be put behind everything
to keep the system moving,” he said. “Because if the system gets stagnant, guess what
we are going to do? We are going to fall back on the same old thing soon as everything
quiets down.”
"They did kill her"

Larryn Rayburn's 2015 death in the
Pontotoc County Justice Center in
Oklahoma still haunts her mother,
Terryl. The family's suffering is part of
the sad routine of such cases.
Like 124 others in the database, Larryn

Rayburn had bipolar disorder.
Like 43 others, her loved ones tried to

warn the jail about her mental illness.
And as in 254 other cases, there were

Courtesy of Terryl Rayburn
allegations that the jail or medical
Larryn Rayburn, right, hugs her sister Haley Ann Rayburn.
provider did not properly treat her
mental illness.
Rayburn was arrested and ordered to be held overnight in the jail for admitted
marijuana use, according to a lawsuit by the family's attorney. She was supposed to
return to court the next morning, but the jail didn't bring her back.
Instead she, like at least 178 others placed in jail with mental illness, died by suicide.
“Our view isn’t that she committed suicide,” said Terryl Rayburn. “Our view is that she
was a victim of manslaughter. Nobody purposely set out to kill her, but due to their
actions, they did kill her.”
Usher, who has worked with many people struggling with mental illness through the
National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that families are usually trying to help and
are desperate to find services.
“They are told they can’t get help until their loved one does something dangerous,” she
said. “And clearly jail is not a safe place for people with mental illness, which your
data clearly shows.”
What many people don’t realize, Usher said, is that mental health treatment works if
people can get it.
“And even for people who are very ill and have very serious conditions, there is a lot
of great recovery stories. Lots of people do really well if they get the right support,”
she said. “It requires leadership and compassion and some resources.”
Hall, the Nashville sheriff, said that although the country’s sheriffs are a diverse
group, the need to better address mental health care in jails is one issue that most, if
not all, agree on.
Ultimately, money needs to be redirected from jails treatment, he said, and people
with mental illness charged with minor crimes need to be kept out of the criminal
justice system altogether.
“I think you have to look people in the face, like myself and people in these positions,
and say, ‘Look, you don't need the money you have in your budget,’ ” Hall said.
“I think that's how we got here,” he said. “It became sexier to call it public safety and
hire police, buy police cars and jails and all that. And so you would need to remove
that money out and put it in the hands of what I think is a health issue, not a criminal
justice matter.”
Providing better mental-health care is not cost-prohibitive, but it requires looking at

big systems such as criminal justice and mental health care, and figuring out how to
best spend tax dollars and treat people, Usher said.
“It requires that you look at and address the whole system rather than just one piece
at a time,” she said. “You are spending a lot of money on jailing people, salaries for
correctional officers, homeless services, ER beds – all that emergency and crisis care.
So we are spending a lot of money there that we might be saving if we were providing
counseling and case management. It’s a much better investment on the front end.”
Until that investment happens, mental illness will go on being criminalized.
And the deaths of inmates with mental illness in America’s jails are bound to
continue.
Marquette University students Alexandria Bursiek, Rebecca Carballo and Diana

Dombrowski contributed to this report.
Graphics built by Will Houp.
Gary A. Harki, 757-446-2370, gary.harki@pilotonline.com
COMING NEXT WEEK

The story of a survivor
MORE INFORMATION
We should stop using jails as dumping grounds for people suffering from mental illness
Tags Mental Health Care Mental Illness Mentally Ill Jail Deaths
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Gary A. Harki
Special projects reporter
Gary Harki is an investigative reporter at The Virginian-Pilot. He was named the Virginia Press
Association's Outstanding Journalist of the Year in 2017. He is currently a fellow at Marquette
University's O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism.
gary.harki@pilotonline.com
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Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails | Jailed in Crisis | piloto...

LIMITED-TIME OFFER ON UNLIMITED DIGITAL ACCESS – ONLY $2 FOR 20 WEEKS

Topeka, KS: This Unbelievable, Tiny Company Is

Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s

Investigation tracks hundreds of deaths

David O'Quin was arrested for

excrement got into cuts that he

Jennifer Towle was suffering from

People with mental illnesses in jails

The country’s 3,000-plus jails are the

Alex Driehaus | The Virginian-Pilot Buy Now

The same grim patterns emerge again and again:

Being locked up in isolation can exacerbate mental illnesses, causing symptoms to

Day by day, Marc’s condition deteriorated.

On March 5, he was no longer answering questions. On March 6, a doctor noted that

Jails: the last resort

Deinstitutionalization, the release of patients from large institutions, began when

The process of deinstitutionalization sped up rapidly in 1965, when Congress created

Did we miss a case? Tell us about it.

Since the start of deinstitutionalization, jail populations have increased exponentially.

“I tell everybody we just reinstitutionalize these people in a different building,” he

“It really makes no sense.”

A crisis without data

“You know, it seems like a little thing,” he said.

One jail at a crossroads

That has led to tragedy.

In April 2015, Jamycheal Mitchell stole

A judge ordered him twice to a state

Mitchell’s feet swelled from constant pacing.

He is one of 71 inmates with schizophrenia or bipolar disease counted by The Pilot’s

But they routinely find themselves in impossible situations.

Each morning, high-level staff

It is a daunting task, especially with

In December, Jonathan Ellis tied a

In March the General Assembly rejected the funding increase.

Myers left his job by the end of the month.

"They did kill her"

Like 124 others in the database, Larryn

Like 43 others, her loved ones tried to

And as in 254 other cases, there were

Providing better mental-health care is not cost-prohibitive, but it requires looking at

Until that investment happens, mental illness will go on being criminalized.

Marquette University students Alexandria Bursiek, Rebecca Carballo and Diana

Graphics built by Will Houp.

Gary A. Harki, 757-446-2370, gary.harki@pilotonline.com

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