Just before 6 p.m., a prison transport van pulled up to a state mental hospital in central Maryland. Inside were two deputies and James Geeter, a 77-year-old man arrested for trespassing at a library in Prince George’s County — and so mentally incompetent that a judge ordered treatment before he could face the charges.
Four hospital staffers, including the clinical director, met the deputies at the door that night last month and turned them away.
The psychiatric facility was full.
The deputies and their prisoner returned to the county’s jail, where Geeter took a spot on a list of 84 inmates throughout Maryland waiting to get into one of the state’s five forensic hospitals — including some inmates charged with violent felonies.
The crisis at Maryland’s mental hospitals is playing out nationwide, putting pressure on jails and testing the patience of judges.
In 25 states surveyed this year by the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center based in Arlington, Va., 1,956 inmates were in local jails waiting for psychiatric hospital slots, leaving them in facilities that were not designed to meet their needs at what can be triple the cost of tending to other inmates.
“If you could design a system to treat these people as ineffectively and as expensively as possible, you’d use jails the way we do,” says the Treatment Advocacy Center’s executive director, John Snook.
[For more of this story, written by Dan Morse, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...4e8e24f3f_story.html]
Comments (1)