Deseret News investigation finds Utah jails holding mentally ill defendants for months awaiting treatment
The series reported that about 70 mentally ill people were in jail awaiting treatment, 35 of them waiting for one of the hospital's 100 beds, and that referrals to the hospital rose from 88 defendants in 2011 to 148 in 2015. Evaluation orders climbed from 745 in 2012 to nearly 1,000 in 2015.
Individual cases showed the cost, including a man who attempted suicide in jail after 15 months and a woman held eight months without hospital care. The paper also reported that Utah spends roughly one in five mental health dollars on competency restoration.
Source: The new asylums: How Utah traps the mentally ill behind bars — Deseret News, by Daphne Chen and McKenzie Romero
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