Marion 'Stepping Up' to reduce number of people with mental illness in jail
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, annually, an estimated 2 million people suffering from serious mental illnesses are booked into local jails across the United States.
It’s a growing issue that, according to the Ohio Mental Health and Addiction Services (OhioMHAS), results in “missed opportunities to link them to treatment, tragic outcomes, inefficient use of funding, and failure to improve public safety.”
In an effort to provide a support system for counties and municipalities struggling to address the issue, the national Stepping Up Initiative was formed in 2015 to help reduce the number of people with mental illness entering local jails. It’s a partnership between The Council of State Governments Justice Center, the National Association of Counties, and the American Psychiatric Association Foundation.
According to its website, Stepping Up “seeks to bolster cross-systems collaboration and build out community-based services and supports to reduce incarceration and reincarceration, respond effectively to people in crisis, and ultimately prevent contact with the justice system in the first place. The Stepping Up planning and implementation framework is designed to meet counties where they are, giving them the flexibility to select the best strategies for their local context.”
“Mental illness is an epidemic across the country and has been for some time,” said James Boleyn, special dockets director for Marion Municipal Court. “But it really manifests in jails and prisons. We are using jails and prisons as, sort of, default treatment agencies because of the lack of resources in our communities as well as the lack of coordination of those resources in our communities.
“We need to look at the role of mental health in our community, why it’s important, and how we can support this population of people suffering from mental illness and support the agencies that provide services to them.”
Boleyn and Brad DeCamp, executive director of Crawford-Marion Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Board (ADAMH), are members of the core planning team along with other professionals who work in mental health, substance abuse treatment, law enforcement, and other fields in the community.
Marion County officially joined the Stepping Up Initiative in 2021 after the county commissioners signed Resolution #2021-0284 to address the issue of inmates at the Multi-County Correctional Center who suffer with mental illness.
Including Marion, 56 counties in Ohio have now joined the Stepping Up Initiative. Neighboring counties that are also part of the program include Crawford, Delaware, Union, and Wyandot.
Boleyn said the lack of resources and inability to properly coordinate existing resources are the two major issues that most communities face in addressing mental health, which in many instances co-occurs with substance abuse. Communities that lacked adequate mental health and substance abuse treatment services experienced increases in the number of people suffering from those issues who began to have run-ins with local law enforcement and ended up being incarcerated.
In many cases, Boleyn said, the offenses for which people with mental health issues are being jailed are “nuisance crimes,” misdemeanors and low-level felonies such as disorderly conduct or property crimes.
Using the resources and programming provided through the Stepping Up Initiative, Marion County officials are developing a “designated jail” program to support criminal offenders and help prevent them from returning to jail by offering mental health and substance abuse disorder treatment.
“There’s a lot of services in Marion County, just not very coordinated, and most of them are under-resourced because they’re small organizations,” Boleyn said. “But if we come together as a group and make a plan and follow that plan, we can better serve that population and, in turn, better serve the larger population. These people are going to lead better, richer lives and the community is going to save a lot tax dollars if we consolidate our resources and help keep these people out of jail.”
Boleyn said anyone in the community with an interest in better serving people suffering from mental health issues is invited to become part of the planning team.
For information about the Stepping Up program or to find out how to be part of it, contact James Boleyn at 740-375-2760 or jboleyn@marionmunicipalcourt.org. Brad DeCamp can be reached at 740-387-8531.
Email: ecarter@gannett.com | Twitter: @AndrewACCarter
This article originally appeared on Marion Star: 'Stepping Up' to reduce number of people with mental illness in jail
