(Jan. 27, 2016) Criminal defendants in Pennsylvania routinely wait months, sometimes years, in county prisons before being transferred to state psychiatric hospitals for treatment to restore them to competency, according to a lawsuit filed last October by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The complaint argued that treatment delays violate the constitutional rights of defendants to due process and their rights to adequate mental health treatment under federal law. In recent years, Federal courts have ruled that a defendant committed to a state hospital shouldn't wait longer than a week to be transferred.
The issues raised by the ACLU's lawsuit were explored last year as part of PennLive's Patients to Prisoners series, which found that defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial were waiting an average of 297 days for transfers to state psychiatric hospitals.
Now, a day before a trial scheduled in federal court, the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the state Department of Human Services announced yesterday that they have reached a settlement agreement (“ACLU, state reach tentative settlement in lawsuit over delays to treat mentally ill,” PennLive, Jan. 26.).
Allowing mentally ill defendants to languish behind bars rather than transferring them to facilities with the resources to provide the treatment they so desperately need is unconscionable.
The following resources from the Treatment Advocacy Center provide data and other information about the treatment of Pennsylvania inmates with severe mental illness and treatment options in the state:
- Pennsylvania-specific data on criminalization of mental illness, criminal diversion, mentally illness population;
- “The Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: Pennsylvania” – from the first national survey of mental illness treatment practices in US prisons and jails;
- “No Room in the Inn: Trends and Consequences of Closing Public Psychiatric Hospitals” – a state-by-state study of the change in public psychiatric hospital bed availability from 2005-2010; and
- Pennsylvania ranking: In 2010, California had 14.6 public psychiatric beds for each 100,000 population, virtually the same number of hospital beds that were available in the US in 1850; the ACLU lawsuit contends that defendants are warehoused behind bars in the absence of treatment facilities.
A copy of the lawsuit and the ACLU Pennsylvania announcement are available online.
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