The Cascade County Sheriff’s Office will receive $1.2 million towards their Crisis Diversion Grant Program, to provide mental health services to inmates. Currently, the Cascade County Detention has limited resources in terms of mental health treatment, but has seen an increase in the need for mental health treatment within the jail.
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The Health Services Administrator at the Cascade County Detention Center, Jessica Martinez, says, “Just seeing how we've escalated in terms of the substance abuse and the mental health disorders that are coming in, like it feels like we are now, essentially, a psychiatric hospital back there trying to navigate mental health needs in conjunction with the legal system, and it’s extremely challenging.”
The medical department at the detention center says that the amount of inmates with mental health issues in the jail is the result of a broken system within the community, and that a lack of mental health resources is how those who are mentally ill end up in the jail system. Martinez says, “One of the areas that we struggle with is we need some type of 24-hour crisis service within our community that allows us to meet people where they're at. We could definitely learn better to de-escalate people in the field, and prevent these unnecessary arrests.”
The Crisis Diversion Grant will fund a mobile response team, where mental health professionals and social workers can meet with a person in crisis while they’re with law enforcement, and hopefully get them the help they need without them ending up in jail.
Every inmate that comes through the Cascade County Detention Center receives a medical evaluation, and if they indicate any mental health struggles, they are assessed by the mental health provider at the jail, Vanessa Williams, who says that’s the majority of inmates that come through.
Once incarcerated, there is only so much that the medical staff can do to help an inmate receive proper treatment. Vanessa Williams is a clinical social worker and mental health provider at the Cascade County Detention Center. She explains, “We can't give them medicine if they refuse to take it. We can't stop them from smashing their heads against the wall except for putting them in a padded chair. They need to be in an environment that can really meet the needs of their mental illness, and you just can't do that here very well in corrections, not therapeutically, anyway.”
Williams says she would like to see more medical providers in-house, and have the space to isolate inmates to work with them one-on-one. However, some inmates that Williams works with need to be treated in a psychiatric hospital. She says, “So many individuals are in here who are so mentally ill they should not be here, they should not be incarcerated, they should not be in these cells. They should be getting help at a state hospital or a psychiatric residence, and they're stuck here because there's nowhere else for them to go.”
There is only one state psychiatric hospital in Montana, Warm Springs Hospital. However, due to overcrowding, inmates can wait months in jail before there is a spot open for them, or they are released back into the community before they’re able to receive treatment.
Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter says, “The State of Montana, via Warm Springs, does not function at all like it's supposed to. So, at the Cascade County Jail, for example, we have become the mechanism that houses most of the mentally ill in our community, which is an extreme challenge because our jail, our facility, and our staffing is not built for that”.
The Sheriff’s Office says the Crisis Diversion Grant will hopefully also allow them to build their own facilities for treatment in the future. Williams says more space and resources would allow them to “Bring in people, and with resources, medications, that kind of stuff, I feel like we could stabilize them at least while they're here, and then hopefully when they leave, they have a better chance of being successful.”
