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JEFF GERRITT

Mental health courts offer better solution than prison

May 14, 2007

Timothy Joe Souders' horrible death last year inside a Jackson prison shook a lot of people. It got legislators talking about the treatment of the mentally ill in Michigan prisons. Now it's time to make sure what happened to Souders doesn't happen to anyone else.

A solution is long overdue. When Michigan closed most of its mental hospitals in the 1990s, the mentally ill didn't just disappear. They ended up on the street, in homeless shelters, and, increasingly, in jails and prisons. One sheriff called the state's jails and prisons the new asylums. Today, nearly 25% of Michigan's 51,000 prison inmates are mentally ill.

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No doubt, putting mentally ill people in a freer, less costly setting was a good idea. But as institutions closed, the state failed to invest in community mental health programs. People with severe mental and emotional problems went untreated.

Some of these mentally ill offenders are too dangerous to remain free. But thousands of others now in prison could be treated more humanely and less expensively in the community. Typically, they've committed a string of minor crimes, like retail theft, disorderly conduct and drug possession. Finally, a frustrated judge with few alternatives locks them up, sometimes with tragic results.

That's what happened to Souders, a mentally ill 21-year-old inmate I wrote about last August. Nine months after he went to prison, he died of heat and thirst. Inside Southern Michigan Correctional Facility, he spent most of his last four days strapped down in a hot isolation cell for unruly behavior, naked and soaked in his own urine

Souders, of Adrian, went to prison in November 2005, after stealing two paintball guns from a Meijer store and threatening a police officer with a stolen knife. His one-to-four-year bit turned into a death sentence.

There are hundreds of mentally ill inmates in Michigan prisons who, like Souders, don't belong there.

Patrick Cantrell, inmate No. 294386, is a dialysis patient serving 2-10 years for assault. Besides kidney-failure, Cantrell, 27, has multiple personality disorders, Tourette's syndrome and mild cerebral palsy affecting his right side. Inside the walls, his dialysis treatments alone will cost taxpayers nearly $40,000 a year. At Southern Michigan, Cantrell is locked in a segregation cell for his own protection. He told officers that his bunkie pressed him for sexual favors. Ratting out another inmate has put him in danger.

When I talked to Cantrell last week through a plate glass window, his shackles and belly chains swallowed his frail 6-foot-4, 155-pound frame. His hair was uncut, his nails bit down. He said he was not responding well to prison dialysis treatments.

"I'm afraid I'm going to die in here," he told me.

Cantrell went to prison in February after fighting with his best friend, John Fincke, and hitting him with a beer bottle. Police said Cantrell also tried to stab Fincke with a screwdriver, which Cantrell denies. When police arrived at the scene, Cantrell was crying. He said he wanted to die.

Fincke received several stitches in his head but asked Livingston County Judge David Reader not to send Cantrell to prison. Fincke said he still wanted to donate a kidney to Cantrell.

By law, the judge could have sentenced Cantrell to life in prison as a habitual offender. Cantrell already had two similar assault convictions and one for resisting arrest.

His mother, Marjorie Seaman, of Fenton, said Cantrell is intellectually gifted but has the maturity of a 15-year-old. A computer whiz, Cantrell planned to develop an interactive program for hospitalized children and rebuild old computers for low-income kids.

"I'm worried about his fate in there," Seaman told me. "Emotionally, he's just not there."

Prisons are built for security, not treatment. They're no place for people with mental disorders that require many medications and continual monitoring. Taxpayers got another reminder of that this month, when a federal jury in Lansing handed down a $2.75-million verdict against MDOC employees for the wrongful death of a mentally ill inmate, 39-year-old Jeffrey Clark.

Clark, serving 9 to 30 years for robbing a convenience story with a beer bottle, died of dehydration five years ago in a hot observation cell in an Ionia prison. He was found with vomit encrusted on his mouth. The water to his cell was turned off and the toilet was dry.

"If the state would have learned something and made a few changes after Jeff's death, I believe Timothy Souders would be alive today," Clark's sister, Bonita Clark-Murphy, of Lansing, told me last week.

Legislators can help keep people like Souders, Cantrell and Clark out of prison. Bills introduced by state Sen. Liz Brater, D-Ann Arbor, would set up mental health courts similar to Michigan's successful drug courts. They would authorize judges to order mental health treatment, instead of jail or prison terms, for minor offenders with illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

For the plan to work, the state will have to put more money into low-cost community mental health programs, but that's a good investment. Community mental health care costs roughly $10,000 a year per person, compared to $50,000 a year or more to keep, treat and provide health care for mentally ill inmates in prison.

Corrections could do a far better job treating mentally ill inmates, but even the best prison systems are not equipped to handle them. Unfortunately, it took a budget crisis and a nationally publicized death for some legislators to see that.

Brater's plan comes too late for Timothy Joe Souders, Patrick Cantrell or Jeffrey Clark, but it could keep hundreds like them in treatment and out of Michigan's $2-billion prison system.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.