Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambitious plan for cutting the number of mentally ill people in New York’s jails will require a great deal of ingenuity and a big shift in priorities by the police, the courts, and social service and housing agencies. If the effort succeeds, it will improve the lives of mentally ill people by getting them treatment and places to live instead of locking them into the “frequent flier” syndrome, in which they are repeatedly jailed for minor offenses, even when they present no threat to public safety.
Nearly 40 percent of the more than 11,000 inmates in city jails suffer from mental illness, up from about 25 percent just seven years ago. These inmates cost considerably more to house than other inmates, partly because they stay nearly twice as long — an average of 112 days — because they can’t make bail; even when they get out, they return to jail again and again. The city task force that produced the mayor’s plan identified more than 400 people who had been jailed at least 18 times in the last five years and who accounted for more than 10,000 jail admissions during that period. This trend is partly a result of the zero-tolerance policing that sweeps people off the streets for low-level offenses like fare beating and trespassing.
[For more of this story go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...ill-out-of-jail.html]
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