PANAMA CITY — Bay County is being forced to hire more jail officers to treat an increasing number of inmates with mental and medical ailments, law enforcement officials said.
As the state slashed its mental health budget in recent years, Sheriff Frank McKeithen has asked Bay County Commissioners to approve his request for nine more corrections officers in the coming year’s budget. The salaries would cost a combined $439,077 in the first year.
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The Bay County Jail population also is seeing a higher percentage of mental and medical issues than the general population. In the last year, the jail’s mental health and medical staff has made contact with 57,035 inmates, McKeithen said.
Among the responsibility of the new hires would be making sure those with mental issues don’t harm themselves or others, jail Warden Rick Anglin told The News Herald in a recent interview.
“These are all corrections officers, but five of those positions are to provide round-the-clock coverage for a specialized unit that we are in the process of developing,” he said. “That specialized unit would be for mental health.”
He said the jail is taking in an increasing number of inmates with mental health disorders requiring special attention and housing.
“The severity of the mental illnesses seems to be increasing,” Anglin said.
In the past few years, the jail has doubled the number of inmates in special housing for mental health, he said.
“Today, we have approximately 40 inmates that we have in a special-housing status for mental health,” he said. “Part of that is suicide precaution, and part of that is what we call ‘behavior observation.’ It’s inmates that have some kind of mental illness that prohibits us from putting them into the general population for their own safety or safety of others.”
He said they have to keep these inmates in a more secure setting.
“When you do that, it requires more manpower to take care of them,” Anglin said. “And just to supervise that type of inmate requires a lot of manpower.”
Anglin said people with mental health issues are being recycled through the jail.
“We are seeing the same people over and over,” he said. “They get out of jail. Sometimes we may release them to a mental health facility, but within a week you see them right back in the door because they were downtown somewhere creating some kind of disturbance or trespassing, something like that, and it’s related directly to their mental illness.”
Many end up being arrested on minor charges such as trespassing or criminal mischief, Anglin said.
“They get arrested and come back to jail,” he said. “And then the process starts over again.”
Mental health facilities
Jails essentially are becoming mental health facilities, not only in Bay County but throughout the country, Anglin said.
“Therefore, we’re trying to take measures to increase mental health staff, provide specialized housing and specialized treatment for this kind of inmate,” Anglin said. “It’s not typically what jails are budgeted for, but it’s getting to the point where we just don’t have a lot of choice.”
The jail has continued to bolster its mental health staff, with three full-time counselors and a psychiatrist that is hired on a contractual basis, he said. Prior to 2005, the jail didn’t even have one full-time mental health counselor.
And there are other costs the jail has to consider. The prescriptions dispensed for people with mental health issues have continued to increase, Anglin said. He estimated about 25 percent of the jail population is on medication to treat a mental health issue.
“I can tell you that as of yesterday we had 231 inmates in this facility that are on some kind of psych medicine,” Anglin said. “As you can tell, most of those inmates we actually manage them in the general population. Out of 231, 40 of them that are so severe that we currently have them in a specialized housing unit. The rest of them are in the general population, but they still get their medication and have to be managed for medical and mental health.”
Fortunately, the jail has been able to keep its monthly prescription bill at about $20,000 even though it is buying many more pills, Anglin said.
“I can’t say there has been an increase” in the prescription bill, “but most of that is due to the fact that we have really worked hard on getting a good contract with a local pharmacy,” he said. “And we have worked very hard” to keep costs down, such as buying generics.
Jerold Derkaz, chief medical officer for the jail, said taking care of the inmates keeps him busy. “I have a thousand inmates, and 40 percent are on medicines and have a multitude of medical problems,” he said, noting that figure is higher than the prevalence in the general population.
“This is a much sicker bunch of people,” he said. “We have a lot of indigent people, homeless people who have been picked up for trespassing and open containers and other charges. These are people who have the most problems, health problems, and most social problems in our society.”
Many of the people with mental issues heading to the jail are coming from the homeless population.
“We have no place to put these people,” he said. “They have no place to go, no income, poor hygiene, poor health care.”
Derkaz said in this climate, some actually find a way to get arrested on minor charges to get the care they need in the jail. Harold Roberts, a homeless man who was among those being fed a dinner at the Panama City Rescue Mission earlier this week, is one of those people. He said that on more than one occasion he’s committed crimes to get into jail. One good way is to hang out by a no-loitering sign, he said. Often, he ends up in jail because he doesn’t have the money to pay tickets, Roberts said.
“I drink a lot of liquor, and I’ve been arrested for loitering,” he said.
Roberts said he has no fear of being locked up.
“Jail is all right, especially when it’s cold outside,” he said.
Rick Briggs, the director of programs for the Panama City Rescue Mission, said jails don’t often have extensive counseling systems and are more prone to dispense drugs to inmates to try and treat their condition.
The homeless people trying to get into jail know that, he said.
“He’ll seek any kind of substitute to get him by until he can get enough money or means to get his drug of choice on the street,” Briggs said. “They’ll steal or commit theft or any crime” to get into jail. “A lot of the homeless population who don’t go through our program try to cycle through the jail system.”
Briggs said he saw this happen firsthand, when a man trying to get into jail stood in front of a police car at McKenzie Park and opened up a container of alcohol. “It gives them a lot of benefits. It gives them a break for a while from the routine.”
Joe Jennings, a mental health counselor at the jail, said people with mental conditions who are living on the street inevitably end up in jail, and state funding cuts in mental health treatment is increasing the inmate population.
“There are fewer and fewer state hospital beds,” he said. “That means there are more and more people out in the community who would have been in the hospital a few years ago.”
He said even the worst mental health cases in which inmates are sent to a state hospital don’t always mean the person isn’t coming back to the jail.
“Normally they don’t keep them very long,” he said of the state facilities. “They are there just long enough to stabilize them and send them back. They may not remain stable because we can’t force them to take medication if they don’t want it.”
He said these patients’ mental conditions can worsen when they are sent back to jail.
The jail “is just not a hospital setting, so they are more likely to decompensate here than they would in a hospital,” he said.
Tanner Michael handles women’s mental health counseling. Last September, she had 139 patients. Today, the number has tripled.
“The reason is because we’re doing a much better job identifying persons who need mental health and getting their needs met,” she said.
On Thursday night this week, 22 jail officers were overseeing 955 inmates.
Anglin said since the recession started in 2008 and the sheriff’s office took over the operations, they have adopted a conservative staffing pattern.
“It was very conservative — not having any idea that the very next year after we took over we were going to start looking at budget cuts,” he said.
Anglin said when the sheriff’s office first took over the jail in 2008, it was funded for 248 corrections officers. Last year, it was funded for 223 people.
“We were losing positions every year, so we just got to a point that our relief factor is gone,” he said.