What do you do with a person who suffers from mental health issues but doesn’t belong in jail?
Where do you place them? How do you help them? Who can take care of them?
These are questions that Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz often faces, as his assistant district attorneys handle cases that involve individuals with mental health issues.
“He’s not a criminal. He committed criminal like acts but he’s not a criminal to the extent that he doesn’t have the mental capacity to form the mental intent necessary for a crime,” Saenz said in an interview last week regarding those cases.
“What you have now is the clash with the criminal justice system with the mental health system. You have a person in jail who doesn’t belong in jail. You have a person who needs treatment, a person who needs help and yet us prosecutors, law enforcement and the jail, we are not equipped to render that help and it’s very frustrating,” Saenz said.
The individuals that Saenz is referring to are low level offenders. Their ages range from teenagers to individuals in their 30s.
According to Mental Health TX, 3,309,000 adults in Texas are living with mental illness while 61% of all adult Texans who need mental health treatment in the last year did not receive it.
Saenz said one of the largest institutions in the state that houses mentally ill individuals is the Harris County Jail System. He said Harris County is proactive in dealing with persons with mental illness. “They can’t wrap their heads around it because it’s that big. It’s that big because nobody prioritizes it, it’s that big because nobody has the resources and the funding to deal with this.”
Saenz said although he doesn’t want to keep people with mental health issues incarcerated, he doesn’t want to release them from jail unless that individual is going to get the care they need. It’s a discussion he has with defense attorneys representing these individuals.
Before Saenz agrees to file a dismissal on a case, he needs to know who will pick up the person from the jail, who will care for them and who will get them the assistance that they need.
“A lot of our folks in Cameron County, if you give them the names in the jail they know them because they are there once a month…to me it’s frustrating. I know what the issue is, I know what the problem is but I can’t do anything about it because I am not set up for it,” Saenz said.
Saenz said several things that are needed to address the issue are properly trained police officers, who are taught how to deal with such individuals, treatment centers in the area where they can get help, additional mental health courts to help with the caseload and funding and resources.
Tropical Texas Behavioral Health Center is the only center in Cameron County that treats people with mental issues but the facility is often flooded with patients, Saenz said. “They don’t have the resources.”
“Unless your family has the resources, money, to place you in a private institution, the person will once again go through the judicial system,” he said.
Saenz said another part of the problem is that the individuals with mental issues don’t want to take their medication to help address their situation but that’s part of the illness. “If you are a sick individual you may see it as a conspiracy. You want me to take that because you are going to control me…it’s part of the whole thing that you aren’t trying to help me, you are trying to hurt me, that’s how they see people,” the district attorney said.
About one-fourth of the mental issue cases the DA’s office deals with pertain to veterans.
“These guys are folks we told go fight for us and they did and God knows what they saw and what they had to do, and then we bring them back and they are expected to flip a switch and just come back and live among us,” like before. “You can’t do that. How do we expect them to do that…we are letting them down and they are getting in trouble” Saenz said.
To address the issue Saenz said mental health has to be prioritized as a major issue for everyone. “It doesn’t make the list of priorities for the legislatures, it doesn’t make the list of priorities for politicians and it doesn’t make the list of priorities for anybody,” he said.
“I just want people to understand that something needs to be done because it’s a very serious problem,” Saenz said. “It’s everybody’s problem. It’s not just the prosecutor’s problem, it’s not just the police problem, it’s not the jails problem, it’s all our problem. This is our community. We have to do something to help these folks, we have to prioritize, we have to understand that they need help and we are the only ones that can help them.”
“It’s very frustrating and I want to do something. I am trained to prosecute, to find somebody, to prove that somebody did something beyond a reasonable doubt and get the right sentence…not for these folks. This is the clash of the criminal justice system and the mental health system,” he said.
“It’s a problem that is not going to go away and it’s not going to solve itself,” Saenz added.
Investigator Martin Sandoval, spokesman for the Brownsville Police Department, said officers undergo 40 hours of Crisis Intervention Training every two years that includes how to deal with people who suffer from mental health issues.
Sandoval said the officers are taught to approach these individuals in a non-threatening manner so they can deescalate an issue instead of making it worse.
“A lot of the times the mental patients they just seem frustrated and agitated, and maybe what that person needs at that time is to be removed from the environment that can be agitated. It can be as simple as ‘come on let’s go outside and let’s have a talk’ and that seems to work a lot when they see an office approaching” in a non-authoritative manor, Sandoval said.
“They teach us that we have to control the situation but we also have to understand what is it that they are going through and how is it that we are there to help,” Sandoval said.
Sandoval said those mental individuals taken into custody are not transported to the jail but are taken to the hospital to undergo a mental evaluation. Once it has been determined that the person is suffering a mental crisis, he or she will be transported to a mental institution for help.
“It’s for the safety of everybody that unfortunately he or she will have to be placed in handcuffs,” he said.
The police department at times receives about eight welfare concerns -concerning mental health- calls a week and at other times as low as five times a week.
Sandoval said the de-escalation training Brownsville PD officers receive is about “90% effective to where we actually get to talk to the individual and they agree to go to the hospital to be evaluated. There’s a very rare portion of it that we actually have to go hands on” and handcuff the individual.
Officials said there’s a misconception that a lot of the homeless population are the ones with mental health issues, while instead it is actually families that have a person with mental issues living with them.
“They cannot receive the help in jail that they need, they need some type of mental evaluation in a mental hospital and unfortunately that is out of our hands…a lot of the patients that we take do go to the mental clinic. Is it enough for them, only time will tell, but can there be more, yes there can always be more. It’s something that not everybody understands until they actually go through it,” Sandoval said.
