Leaving mentally ill inmates untreated carries a heavy cost for them and for taxpayers

Ponder these facts. During 2018, North Carolina prisons housed more than 36,578 inmates. That’s a population equal to the 25th largest municipality in our state. About 17%, or approximately 6,200 of our prison population, suffer from mental illness. Also consider that at any given time, up to 24,000 inmates are held in North Carolina’s local jails. If you apply the same multiplier to this population, that is another 4,250 mentally ill persons incarcerated. From these statistics, there are approximately 10,500 incarcerated, mentally ill inmates in our prisons and jails combined.

Shamefully, we have allowed our prisons and jails to be a depository for our most vulnerable citizens. Even though such inmates do receive some form of treatment or therapy during incarceration, most, if not all, of our prisons and jails are not equipped with the personnel, training or facilities to provide them with the treatment or therapy they need.

Many mental health care experts have noted that there is a nexus between having mental illness and being incarcerated at some point. As a society, we have a legal, moral and ethical responsibility to properly care for these individuals.

North Carolina has the capacity to provide those behind bars the professional help they need and we can do it at a lower cost to society. During my tenure as lieutenant governor of North Carolina, we proposed enhancing the treatment for inmates who had substance abuse problems. We determined it cost less to provide inmates with adequate treatment while and after they were incarcerated, than having them languish behind bars without any treatment. From these efforts and others, the Drug, Alcohol, Recovery Treatment Program (DART) was successfully implemented at Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro and still operates today.

The same savings would likely be realized if we provided better treatment and therapy of the mentally ill who are incarcerated in our jails and prisons.

While there are attempts to improve the plight of the mentally ill in North Carolina, we need to intensify our efforts to address this disgraceful truth about our mentally ill inmates in prisons and jails. Specifically, more effort should be made to provide better treatment and therapy for inmates while incarcerated and after being released. Doing so would undoubtedly require less resources in the long-term, hence less expense to the taxpayer, as shown by the DART Program. Robert Kurtz, who heads up the N.C. Jail Diversion Program, summed it up best stating, “Doing nothing can be very expensive.”

It’s past time for our state government leaders, together with the business, medical, legal, philanthropic, religious and other communities, to address this issue. If we are going to continue using our prisons and jails as depositories for the mentally ill, we should provide those inmates adequate resources while they are incarcerated and after they are released. If so, there would be a realistic chance such citizens could lead productive lives.

Incarcerating the mentally ill without adequate services and infrastructure for care and treatment makes no sense to taxpayers. And that is especially so now when more mentally ill people will likely be deposited in our prisons and jails as the pandemic adds pressure on those who live with debilitating mental stress.