(June 2, 2017) The CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes" aired a compelling segment recently on Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's work with the tens of thousands of inmates who cycle through the Cook County Jail each year. According to Sheriff Dart, 95% of the 7,500 people in the jail await trial; they are poor, members of a gang or the most vulnerable in society — people with serious mental illness (estimated at a third of the jail’s population).
Sheriff Dart runs, in what is called one of the nation's largest mental health facilities, a model for other jails that includes medication and doctor’s appointments for the inmates who need it.
From the episode:
"60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl: This man — who also has a history of mental illness — has been in and out of the jail 37 times. How does that happen? How does someone come back to a jail 37 times?
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart: What in God's name do you expect to happen with that person? OK so this person has a serious mental illness, he's not being treated, his family and him have been disconnected for years, he obviously doesn't have a job. He has nowhere to live. What do you think is going to happen? I'll tell you what's going to happen. He will come in contact with law enforcement, either because he's trying to find a place to sleep or he's trying to find something to eat and he'll be back in here. It's not because he walked out of here saying, "Listen, I want to go and commit horrific crimes." It's like he's trying to survive.
Lesley Stahl: In many ways society has turned jails and prisons into mental health clinics and you're actually running one here.
Tom Dart: Yeah. I said, "OK, if they're going to make it so that I am going to be the largest mental health provider, we're going to be the best ones. We're going to treat 'em as a patient while they're here, it's like, we are going to think differently."
Watch "Cook County Jail" on CBS.com. And read about the criminalization of mental illness — how 50 years of failed mental health policy have placed law enforcement on the front lines of mental illness crisis response and turned jails and prisons into the new asylums.