Jail changes mental health provider
The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania estimates 65 percent of county jail inmates in the state have a substance abuse disorder; 10 to 30 percent suffer from mental illness; and as many as 14 percent have serious mental illness.
The association plans Friday to draw attention to 131-page report from its Comprehensive Behavioral Task Force at a news conference at the Dauphin County Judicial Center in Harrisburg.
Washington County Commissioner Harlan Shober, president-elect of CCAP, was not planning to attend the media event, but he stressed even after the task force members discuss their findings, “the task force is going be continuing its work. I think this is putting the issue in front of us. What are the solutions and how can we implement them? I think the mental health issue is nationwide.”
Over the past 16 years, the state closed Western Center in Washington County and Mayview State Hospital in Allegheny County.
Shober said dealing with inmates’ mental health problems is an important issue but added, “We want to catch people and treat them before they get into trouble.”
Prisoners’ mental health is an issue the Washington County Prison Board, of which Shober and the board of commissioners are members, dealt with just last week.
The prison board and the board of commissioners, at the request of Warden Edward Strawn, approved a 10-month agreement with PrimeCare Medical Inc. of Harrisburg, to provide mental health services to inmates for 10 months at a cost of $20,000 per month from the county’s Human Services departmental operating budget beginning Sept. 1.
After three suicides at the jail last year, then-warden John Temas said in October he was seeking a proposal from a provider “that would better enhance our program of handling inmates with mental health problems.”
Neither SPHS Southwest Behavioral Care Inc., the current provider, nor any other local provider responded to the county’s request for proposals related to jail psychiatric services and, according to Jan Taper, administrator of Washington County Behavioral Health and Developmental Services department, the providers are in a predicament.
“Psychiatrists are becoming very, very tough to find. There are fewer people to choose from,” she said. “They are not able to provide any more personnel or time. It takes special personnel with a forensic background.
“PrimeCare has been in business for 30 years in 64 correctional facilities in four states, so they’re pretty seasoned.”
PrimeCare specializes in correctional health care. Its website states that its psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals specialize in acute psychiatric inpatient care, crisis management, suicide prevention programs and collaboration with local judicial systems. It also makes telemedicine services available through video hookup.
For fiscal year July 1, 2015, through June 30, 2016, the county paid SPHS Southwest Behavioral Care, Inc. $64,516 for their services to incarcerated individuals, wrote county Controller Michael Namie in an email. “SPHS began to provide these services to Washington County during the fiscal year 2003-04. Additional services will be provided under the Prime Care contract,” Namie wrote.
PrimeCare is to provide a licensed social worker and a physician’s assistant or certified nurse practitioner for 40 hours each week, according to Taper, and consultation with a psychiatrist via video hookup. “There will be a blended funding stream,” Taper said.
She said the SPHS contract provided a psychiatrist who came to the jail one day a week for a few hours and a psychiatric nurse who reported to the jail another day once a week.
A call to an administrator of the Charleroi-based SPHS was not immediately returned Thursday.
According to a summary of its report posted online, CCAP states, “Costs to provide medical care for inmates exceed $100 million annually. The average cost of incarceration in a county jail is approximately $40,000 annually, compared to many community-based alternatives (that) are estimated to cost less than half that amount.”
The organization’s summary points to pretrial services (a program that Washington County Court instituted earlier this year), comprehensive reform of the state’s bail system and options for probation violations that use community supervision rather than jail as options for counties.
“The public sentiment on criminal justice, and those who are incarcerated, mentally ill or addicted to drugs and alcohol, is rarely positive and usually driven by perceptions that are inaccurate. Despite statistics that prove those with mental illness are no more prone to violent behavior, and are actually more likely to become victims of crime, is not widely known, leading to pressures on policy makers to seek public protection measures that do little or nothing to solve the problem.”
It calls on county commissioners and their solicitors to review suicide prevention policies, and understand potential risks and liabilities associated with placing inmates in isolation or solitary confinement, especially inmates with serious mental illness.
Counties should consider training in how to identify “at-risk individuals and diversionary protocols for police officers and various sectors of the system including judges, probation, jail staff (and) detention,” CCAP’s report summary states.