A naked man tries to impersonate a police officer by directing traffic.
These are the actions of real people who have been arrested and booked into Bell County Jail, officials said.
People with mental illness place a significant strain on the criminal justice system in the county and cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
“It’s a sad state of affairs. We see them all the time,” Cpl. Arden Rivenbark, a jail administrator, said about prisoners with mental conditions. “Most of them are arrested on criminal trespass charges or failure to ID.”
At times up to 50 percent of the jail population has been prescribed medications for psychosis or depression, Rivenbark said.
The two most common medications handed out to prisoners are medications used to treat psychiatric conditions and blood pressure, jail officials said. And the amount of medications some prisoners are taking is startling.
“We have one prisoner on 11 different meds, and he’s not the one with the most,” said Janette Wenzel, an LVN who spends most of her eight-hour shift going from cell to cell handing out medications.
It takes 12 hours for the medications to be dispersed with some inmates receiving three doses a day.
One inmate alone swallows 42 pills a day, Wenzel said.
“We have people here with major medical problems,” Rivenbark said.
Last month the county spent $43,000 on inmate medications.
“I think it’s a travesty. Jail is not a place for people who have dire mental situations,” said Maj. Bob Patterson, the top jail administrator.
“I think sometimes we have more mentally ill here than in the state hospital,” Rivenbark said.
Those with the most severe issues who aren’t competent to appear before a judge are transferred to the Austin State Hospital.
On Friday, the jail had 10 people in Austin for competency evaluations or emergency commitments. One of the inmates had been in Austin for treatment since September and was still not competent to appear before a judge, Rivenbark said.
And since May 2007 four inmates were shipped back to Bell County deemed incompetent to stand trial.
“That’s when the attorneys scratch their heads and say ‘what now?’” Rivenbark said.
At that point if the inmate has been charged with a misdemeanor, the charge is usually dropped and the person is released from jail with a week’s worth of medication, Rivenbark said.
“Every lawyer is trying to get his client to make good, rational decisions and some people just can’t,” said Jim Hewitt, a defense attorney with an office in Belton. “There are a great deal of people out there who are not only incompetent but insane.
“Those are the clients who you don’t forget, because they’re off-the-charts unusual.”
The Austin State Hospital averages 292 patients a day with a goal of stabilizing psychiatric illness in people and returning them back to the community.
“They are medicated until they receive some degree of normalcy but nobody can maintain their medications,” Hewitt said. “They believe they are on their A-game when they are off their meds.
“I don’t think I’ve had a client yet that was able to successfully maintain their drug regimen. All of them return essentially to where they were before.”
Rivenbark confirmed that recidivism is common among the mentally ill. She said those who have been released often find themselves, sooner or later, in a booking room being asked the standard booking question “do you hear voices nobody else hears?”
As long as the mentally ill pose no harm to themselves or others they, like anyone else, are allowed to move freely in our society, but when serious laws are violated they suffer consequences for their actions.
“Prosecutors look at it like ‘I’ve got a problem on the streets and I’m going to warehouse them in (the state prison system),’” Hewitt said. “The mentally ill that get tied up in the system, they’re usually not going to get parole.”
Patterson sees the issue as something the Legislature should address.
“I think government exists to provide for the welfare of people,” Patterson said. “On this issue I think state government is woefully inadequate.”
