Whats happening in jails [as opposed to prison] with the mentally ill across America?
Well, jails typically are funded and in effect governed at the county level or the city level. There’s a cliché that the biggest mental hospital in California is the Los Angeles County Jail. So of course they’re not governed by statewide prison mental health cases, because it’s a different jurisdiction, but there have been any number of successful lawsuits involving medical and mental health care in jails. Typically, most of the people in jail are there in turnstile fashion. They’ve been arrested, they couldn’t make bail, and they’re being held until trial. So they’re pretrial detainees. And then there’s another population who have been sentenced, typically as misdemeanors, to a year or less. Jails have one set of problems that prisons don’t have, and it’s very tough. Jails have to do crisis stabilization and detoxification. By the time a prisoner goes through the jail, trial process or what have you and ends up in prison, they have been detoxified. And 70 [percent] or 80 percent of th
