(May 20, 2014) Miami-Dade County Judge Steve Leifman pleads in the Miami Herald for Florida to treat its mentally ill residents in an op-ed in the Miami Herald (“Give people with mental illness treatment, not a jail cell,” May 17).
Leifman describes a University of South Florida study that examined the costs of 97 people with severe mental illness over a five-year period in Miami-Dade County.
Almost all of the subjects were homeless. They also experienced 2,200 arrests, 27,000 days in jails and 13,000 days in hospitals and emergency rooms. The total cost to taxpayers was estimated to be $13 million dollars.
“Shocking? Yes. Surprising? No,” Leifman writes. “Florida ranks 49th nationally in funding for community mental-health treatment.”
We certainly are not surprised. According to our 2012 bed study, the miserable national average is 14 beds per 100,000 people, but Miami-Dade musters only 3. This means that of the 185,000 people diagnosed with serious mental illness in the county, only a tiny percentage receives treatment through the public mental health system.
Of course, the scarcity of psychiatric treatment means that “the county jail has become the largest psychiatric institution in Florida.”
“If we treated people with primary healthcare needs the way we treat people with mental illnesses, there would be rampant lawsuits and criminal indictments,” Leifman says. “But people in a psychiatric crisis without financial means who are admitted to a hospital receive treatment only as long as they are considered dangerous to themselves or others . . . . Such people are then discharged, often to homelessness, and eventually find their way into the criminal-justice system again — and again and again.”
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