Huffington Post - For the last five years, the San Antonio Police Department has responded to mental health calls by dispatching officers who have received special training in how to speak with patients. The officers then bring the patients not to the police precinct or to jail, but to a treatment center. According to Leon Evans, president of the Center for Health Care Services and one of the architects of the strategy, the center has treated some 18,000 people who would have otherwise gone to jail and eventually ended up back on the street.
In Seattle, police are offering low-level drug offenders free housing and counseling as an substitute for jail and prosecution. Likewise, Salt Lake City has adopted what is known as a “housing first” model for dealing with homelessness.
“Instead of asking people to change their lives before we gave them housing, we chose to give them housing along with the supportive services and then allow them to change their lives if they wanted to,” explains Gordon Walker, director of Housing and Community Development for Utah.
In recent years, support for such “alternatives to incarceration” has grown, with states around the country experimenting with their own variations on the theme. The reason is clear: The United States has more than 2 million people behind bars, a 500 percent increase over the past three decades. Addiction, mental illness and homelessness account for many of the crimes that have led to this predicament. (About a fifth of state prisoners and jail detainees have a “recent history” of mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.)
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