A special reintegration program has documented its ability to lower costs for treating mental illness — and its efforts could potentially prevent many individuals from getting arrested again.
The problem?
There’s not enough money.
If the nonprofit Going Home organization could get funding, it could help many people maintain good mental health and decrease the number of mentally ill individuals getting arrested for misdemeanors, organizers say.
What typically happens when someone is mentally ill, homeless and not taking medication, said Les Estrella, Going Home interim CEO, is that the person gets arrested for a simple infraction such as trespassing or causing a disturbance.
The person eventually gets released from incarceration to the streets and receives two weeks of medication.
If the individual doesn’t connect with medical services outside prison and doesn’t get a job fast enough, he or she often becomes immediately homeless again, gets in trouble for trespassing or other misdemeanor crimes, and ends up back in jail.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Estrella said.
For a few individuals, the Going Home organization’s pilot program helped break that cycle at a cost of about $130 a day to house an inmate.
Three County Council members offered $5,000 apiece from their discretionary funds to help Going Home create the pilot project.
With that $15,000, Going Home housed six people in the community after incarceration, with immediate “wrap-around” services that included counseling and case management to give them three months of stability immediately upon exiting the prison system.
“It’s only a snapshot, but I think an accurate snapshot, of the bigger picture,” Estrella said.
“Those same six months, we keep them in jail for a three-month period … that’s $68,580,” said grant writer Carol Matayoshi.
Thus, Estrella said, it makes more sense to pay the upfront costs of Going Home in order to save the cost of incarceration. The Hawaii Community Correctional Center has 292 beds, but as of Thursday, it had 365 inmates, Estrella said. Releasing some of them to wrap-around mental-health services so they do not re-offend, Estrella said, would open up more beds and slow the flow of misdemeanor crimes. About 80 of the current inmates take some type of psychotropic drug, he said. Sixty have been diagnosed with severe mental illness, “in a population that isn’t a good fit for jail.”
There are programs to assist homeless veterans, homeless families, homeless youth. But programs to help homeless people with mental illness are very limited, Estrella said.
Going Home has served people with PTSD, bipolar disorder, antisocial personality disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression and borderline personality disorder.
“It’s very cost-effective and it helps clear up bed space,” Estrella said. Going Home continues to seek funding, but it’s running on a shoestring budget that runs out next summer.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
