Criminal justice focus of mental health conference

If you go

• What: National Alliance on Mental Illness 2014 Washington state conference.

■ When: Starting at 9 a.m. today.

■ Where: Red Lion Hotel Vancouver at the Quay, 100 Columbia St.

■ Cost: $100 at-the-door cost for today only.

NAMI Southwest Washington

• Address: 8019 N.E. 13th Ave., Vancouver.

• Phone: 360-695-2823.

• On the Web: namiswwa.org

On the Web:

Listen to Dan Pacholke, deputy secretary of operations for the state Department of Corrections, at an event earlier this year:

http://youtu.be/FTUpFYo0rMI

Advocates and activists have been “piecemealing” changes and improvements in Washington state’s mental health system for years. It hasn’t been good enough, according to Gordon Bopp, president of the state chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grass-roots group that kicked off a weekend conference at Vancouver’s Red Lion Hotel at the Quay on Friday.

The conference focus is “decriminalizing” mental illness, and Bopp said systemic legal reform is what’s really needed to divert people with mental illness from jails and prisons and toward solutions and healing.

The deinstitutionalization wave of the late 20th century was a great idea — more humane, therapeutic and cost effective than keeping people with mental illness warehoused in asylums and psychiatric hospitals — but it only worked for the lucky few who were surrounded by services and support once they were out, according to Sandy Mullins, an expert on sentencing policy and a public safety advisor to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

The widespread, unintended consequence of so-called deinstitutionalization was actually a massive shift of mentally ill people from one type of institution to another, she said: from hospitals and asylums to jails and prisons.

Today, Mullins said, 36 percent of the state’s prison population has mental illness. According to Dan Pacholke, the deputy secretary of operations for the state Department of Corrections, the ratio of mentally ill people behind bars to those in psychiatric facilities is three to one.

Pacholke calls Corrections “the bucket for failed social policy. We get the people for whom nothing else has worked. People who have fallen through all the other social safety nets.”

“What are we getting out of the money we spend” incarcerating people, Mullins wondered. Simply locking people up costs serious money, she said — “and then they get out and we’ve done nothing to change their behavior.” Their rights are curtailed, they have no place to go, little opportunity to earn a living and severely limited access to public assistance, Mullins said; is it any wonder that they tend to reoffend and wind up back behind bars?

Without much in the way of program or budget support, Pacholke said, the Department of Corrections has gotten cautiously creative with its own therapeutic measures and programs for the general prison population and even for the most dangerous, difficult-to-handle prisoners who may otherwise be condemned to little but isolation and deterioration.

These include everything from special units and programs for special populations — such as the mentally ill, the developmentally delayed, the young, the elderly — all the way down to redesigned classroom chairs that are absolutely secure in a way that keeps prisoners feeling safe from, for example, rival gang members who may be right there in the same classroom.

Those chairs, Pacholke said, allow everyone to forget their fears and hatreds and focus on the lesson at hand; those therapeutic programs facilitate socializing together in a way that may have been impossible before. Overall, he said, the state’s so-called “intensive management” prison population — the most difficult, dangerous and severely isolated ones — dropped by 30 percent since those therapeutic programs were introduced in 2011.

Washington state’s success at this has been significant enough to vault Pacholke in front of a “TED Talk” audience earlier this year; take a look at http://youtu.be/FTUpFYo0rMI..

Also speaking on Friday was Dan Satterberg, King County’s prosecuting attorney since 2007. Satterberg called the state mental health system “a ‘system’ in air quotes.’ ” What it really is, he said, is “a loosely associated hodgepodge” of underfunded efforts.

Now is the time to take a hard look at criminal justice reforms, Satterberg said, since costs continue to climb even while crime rates and felony convictions have been dropping for years. There are over 18,000 inmates in Washington state prisons right now, he said; that’s three and a half times the number 30 years ago, and another 1,400 prison beds are forecast to be needed in the next decade “if we do nothing.”

We can build another expensive prison, Satterberg said, or we can invest in the education and services — like early mental health treatment and continued education for badly behaved kids who have been suspended from school — that ultimately pulls more of them back from the bring and points them toward better futures.

Satterberg championed mental health crisis training for police that emphasizes listening and respect. That’s a far cry from the traditional training of police like “warriors,” he said, who strive to take control of a chaotic situation by issuing commands and then “escalating” when people don’t comply. Nearly all King County police have received this training, he said, and they’re also pilot-testing a street-level, quick-response mental health diversion program.

That’s a privately funded Crisis Solutions Center where just-arrested offenders can get immediate mental health evaluation and intensive treatment, Satterberg said, during a short- or medium-term stay. Police taking a fresh arrest to the Crisis Solutions Center “literally drive past the jail” and keep going, he said.

Friday’s NAMI proceedings wrapped up with dinner at the Clark County Jail’s Work Center, served by inmates; there was also music and a “Stand Up For Mental Health” comedy show. The conference continues at 9 a.m. today; Saturday-only admission is $100.