(Nov. 19, 2015) A six-part, investigative series by the Argus Leader found that South Dakota routinely jails mentally ill defendants for half a year or more without trial because of a backlog of court-ordered mental health exams in the state, aggravated by a cap on evaluations at the state's mental health hospital (“Locked in limbo,” Nov. 11).
The first installment in the series tells the story of Ronnie Medenwaldt, a 72-year-old, schizophrenic South Dakotan.
Neighbors called 911 last February after hearing banging and other loud noises coming from Ronnie Medenwaldt’s apartment. When police arrived, Medenwaldt answered the door with a knife and refused to leave. He was arrested and jailed for three months before a judge ordered a mental health evaluation.
Medenwaldt sat in the Minnehaha County Jail for another eight months waiting for a competency evaluation. This is not unusual in South Dakota, the Argus Leader investigation found.
“What we are talking about is people sitting in the jail because they are mentally ill,” said Alecia Fuller, an attorney with the Pennington County Public Defender’s office.
Public defenders and mental health advocates rail against a system that doesn’t provide the necessary treatment for inmates and won’t pay for the basic evaluation that may resolve the case.
"That makes me so furious," said Phyllis Arends, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Sioux Falls. "Jails are not treatment facilities. People are just being held and receiving nothing to help them get better."
Stories like Medenwaldt’s highlight a trend of people with mental illnesses being swept into the criminal justice system.
We have placed hundreds of thousands of severely mentally ill individuals in prisons and jails that are neither equipped nor staffed to handle such problems. It is a situation that is grossly unfair to both the inmates and the corrections officials and should be the subject of public outrage and official action.
Resources from the Treatment Advocacy Center on South Dakota:
- In South Dakota, a person with serious mental illness is 2.4 times more likely to end up in jail than receive treatment in a hospital.
- South Dakota does little to train law enforcement to handle people in a psychiatric crisis.
- South Dakota has only 62% of the beds necessary to meet the needs of its population with severe mental illness.
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