by Natasha Khairullah
Staff Writer
“The City of Jacksonville paid over $10 million in 2002 to process offenders convicted of crimes as simplistic as misdemeanor traffic offenses and the cost keeps climbing with each passing year. Next year, we will spend even more to achieve nothing.”
Sheriff John Rutherford made that statement five years ago while trying to help reduce the city’s recidivism rate among mentally ill offenders. By getting legislation passed to shut the criminal justice system’s “revolving door,” Rutherford hoped to make intervention and drug treatment a possibility for them.
In 2004, Gov. Jeb Bush signed that legislation, providing a minimum mandatory sentence of six months with a maximum sentence of one year for those who are mentally disabled or drug-dependent. The legislation also classified an adult defendant as a habitual misdemeanor offender if convicted of a (second) specified misdemeanor in a 365 day period.
Wednesday, while addressing members of the legal community at a Mental Health Awareness and Ethics CLE training course hosted by Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, Rutherford said the city still has a long way to go before reaching equality for mentally ill and drug-dependent offenders, despite the legislation.
“We’re almost there. We need help and cooperation from the lawyers and attorneys,” he said. “We need them to recognize that sometimes the best thing for the client is not getting them released, but keeping them in (jail or a court-ordered treatment facility) so they can get better.”
Rutherford, along with five other panelists, discussed the societal and economic effects of mental health care on the criminal justice system and ways members of the legal community can help identify those offenders most in need of treatment.
Rutherford’s presentation was titled,“Tales from the City’s Largest Mental Health Provider” and gave a glimpse into the challenges faced by the sheriff’s office when forced, essentially, to treat mentally ill substance dependent criminals, as well as the impact that booking and incarcerating them has on virtually everyone in the City.
“What we’re seeing year after year are a few people that are arrested over and over again for the same offense and so our facilities have started to possess a revolving door quality,” said Rutherford. “Many suffer from alcohol and/or drug abuse or mental illness.”
The average amount of time these individuals are spending in jail is 120 days, a sentence that Rutherford says is too short to actually implement programs that will help treat their problems and keep them from re-entering the system.
According to the JSO’s Department of Correction’s “Recidivism Statute Chapter Breakdown: 2002” study, the majority of the criminal charges committed as repeat misdemeanors include drug and alcohol possession.
A large number of the repeat offenders with the highest recidivism rate are those who have a mental illness and/or substance abuse problems, according to Rutherford.
In 2002, 758 people in Jacksonville were incarcerated an average of 111 days a year averaging 6.5 arrests each. Of those arrested, some are career criminals and some are homeless (though many are not). Rutherford pointed out that the homeless population is the one least likely to receive treatment, as they rarely access available community services such as Jacksonville’s Matrix House.
An event that Rutherford said was a real “eye opener” was when the director of jails and prisons for Duval County met “Jeffrey,” a repeat offender who was “failed” by the county’s criminal justice system by being incarcerated over 100 times and eventually becoming homeless without ever receiving any treatment or being mandated by the courts to undergo treatment for his drug addictions and illnesses.
“After that happened, we worked with (state) Sen. Jim Horne to introduce 1997 legislation to address habitual misdemeanor offenders,” said Rutherford. “And still people were stuck (in the revolving door).”
He added that unless changes are made, history will repeat itself.
“In the 1970s the jails released all mentally ill inmates and said they were going to build other facilities to treat them – which never happened,” he said. “That was the start of deinstitutionalizing and criminalizing mental illness.”
Those changes, according to Rutherford, need to be made by the ones in charge.
“The thing that attorneys and judges can do to help prevent high recidivism numbers within this community is to work with the correctional facilities proactively,” he said. “And understand the fact that ‘getting them out’ isn’t always going to ‘get them what they need’.”
Chief Judge Don Moran, who gave some insight from the sentencing perspective, said the given task is not that easy.
“I know what the sheriff is trying to do and I admire him for it and yes, we do have a lot of people in jail that have mental health issues,” said Moran. “But as far as treatment in the jail goes, it isn’t easy to say to someone, ‘you need to be in jail for X amount of years even though you only committed a 10-day offense.”
“I think each and every case has to be looked upon individually and I don’t think, realistically, that you can expect these people that have alcohol problems or drug problems or mental health problems to step forward and ask for the help. It would take the judge just mandating a long sentence and that’s just a difficult thing to do.”
Moran added that judges could give longer sentences if someone is seen as a habitual offender. But in those instances, the sentence is supposed to be for punishment, not mandated treatment.
Moran, like Rutherford, says a lot of the current challenges faced by the legal systems are direct results of deinstitutionalization.
“We released them and now they’re allowed to sleep under bridges and eat out of garbage cans and all that. Is it right? I don’t know, but that’s a social decision that was made and now to say we’re going to put these individuals in jail so we can help them ... I don’t know that that’s a decision that the sheriff should make or a judge should make. It’s a societal one,” he said.
“I think it (longer sentences) is worth trying on any individual case. But to suggest that we should start locking up all misdemeanors that have alcohol problems for an extended period of time doesn’t make much sense to me.”