New booking center for Houston jail should better help mentally ill inmates, sheriff says

From the Houston Chronicle:

A proposed eight-story building where 1,200 inmates would be locked up, the sheriff is quick to say, is not a jail.

The booking center would be a new gateway into and out of Harris County's 9,400-bed jail system. That gateway is currently a turnstile for so many frequently arrested mentally ill people that the jail is often called the largest mental health facility in the state.

So Sheriff Adrian Garcia is promoting the center in part as a $250-million ounce of prevention. With space set aside for mental health care, some nonviolent criminal suspects could get treatment instead of a cell, and exiting inmates could be shown services instead of the street.

On Tuesday, the Harris County Commissioners Court will consider the sheriff's plan along with a list of other potential projects at its annual review of what to build. The court could ask its budget director to work on a ballot measure for voters to consider. Or it could shelve the plan.

"It's much more than a booking facility," said Steven Schnee, executive director of the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County. The current booking center is so crowded that there is space for neither specialists nor places to send the incoming other than cells.

What the new center would offer is a "Door B," Schnee said. He does not know what exactly will be behind the door, but he envisions a place where various agencies that serve the mentally ill can set up a one-stop area that avoids the complications of shuffling a patient from one organization to another — or finding a particular inmate among the 9,400 distributed in three downtown buildings.

"Door B is to begin to try to reconstruct lives and help people," Schnee said. With that help, the mentally ill are far less likely to return to jail as often, he said.

Beyond the exam rooms and offices of mental health professionals, the center's 1,200 beds would be dedicated to mentally ill inmates (and to a smaller population of women) to keep them out of the main jail population.

Some jail reform advocates say programs, not facilities, are the way to manage the challenge.

"If all of the money is being pulled toward the jail, there may not be the funds to focus on the alternatives," said Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The costs of running a new building - utilities, staffing, maintenance - will compete for tight budget dollars with reforms that would divert more mentally ill arrestees into treatment instead of cells, said Levin and Ana Yanez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.

"When economies get really difficult," Yanez-Correa said, "the first things that are cut are treatment programs." Such a scenario removes programs that could save taxpayer money in avoided jail costs while retaining the debt, interest and operational costs of a new facility.

A new booking center's backers say it would be hard to provide the services without having the facility first.

"Part of the problem right now is: Once the sheriff releases somebody, he has no control over them at that point. If you say, 'Well here's an address, go to this address,' they may or they may not," County Judge Ed Emmett said.

Meanwhile, Emmett said, the costly incarceration of the mentally ill continues.

"We've got far too many people who are in our criminal justice system who need to be in the mental health system," Emmett said.