Mississippi's forensic unit has 35 beds and a nine-to-eleven-month wait, leaving mentally ill defendants in jail
The Jackson Free Press reported that Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield has only 35 beds for criminally charged patients, 15 of them for inpatient evaluation, and that the state mental health department put the wait for one of those spots at nine to eleven months. In fiscal 2016 the department did 210 pretrial evaluations at the hospital and admitted 37 people for restoration, and its budget had since been cut. A department spokesman cited a shortage of credentialed evaluators as another statewide problem.
Hinds County Circuit Judge Tomie Green said her court contracts with a few private psychiatrists for faster evaluations, at county expense, and has pieced together a makeshift mental-health docket. She said people with mental illness still linger in jail much longer than other defendants.
The piece also notes a new state law creating mental-health courts in six of the state's 22 circuits, without dedicated funding and without Hinds County. It is an early local account of the bottleneck that would draw national attention later in 2017.
Source: Stuck Behind Bars, Waiting for Mental Care — Jackson Free Press, by Arielle Dreher
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