James Tatsch was not charged with any crime. But when he was found unresponsive in an isolation cell at the Alcorn County Jail on Jan. 17, he had been locked up for 12 days. He died at the local hospital.
Tatsch was waiting for mental health treatment through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Every year, hundreds of people going through the process are detained in county jails for days or weeks at a time while they wait for evaluations, hearings and treatment. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and receive little or no mental health care while jailed.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during this process. Tatsch, who was 48 years old, is at least the 15th. No one in the state keeps track of how often people die while jailed for this reason. The news organizations identified the deaths through lawsuits, news clips and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports. MBI investigates in-custody deaths only at the request of the local sheriff or district attorney.
Wait, if they are sending patients to jail and treating them as criminal defendants what’s up with habeas corpus in that scenario? And if they’re not criminal defendants and are committed for mental health treatment why are they in jail? I mean, even before 15 deaths, that probably shouldn’t be how that goes.
They’re there pending a mental health evaluation. In this situation, the person is held until a mental health practitioner is able to meet with them to evaluate their eligibility for a treatment program, or to see if they are competent to stand trial for a crime they committed while of questionable mental stability. Importantly, in neither example has the person been charged with a crime.
The administrative reason they are in jail is that they have been ruled a danger to self, others or unknown risk factor. They have to be contained until evaluation, and we have literally no other choice but to use a jail for that. There are only around 400 beds total at the iirc 3 institutions in Mississippi that are certified to perform forensic mental health evaluations, and… well they’re full. It’s either put them in the jail, where at least they have a bed, or chain them to the gurney and leave them in a hallway at an overworked mental health institute (which is literally what happens. But trust me that somehow its much worse than you think.)
Yeah, okay, but sue the goverment to shit, then. Or whoever runs the medical institution in question not providing adequate service. The people responsible not having the resources or the political will doesn’t remove the rights of a patient. If I have a mentally ill relative that needs to be committed and they end up in jail for weeks I’d be pissed and extremely litigious even before they end up mysteriously dead.
And also, does “pending evaluation” suspend habeas corpus if there is no evaluation in place to deem them a risk? WTF? What’s to keep a hostile actor from maliciously putting a person in this track instead of properly charging them if they’re just trying to dump them in a hole for two weeks? How does that hold to any constitutional scrutiny in the US? Surely you’re either deemed incompetent and you are involuntarily committed until you’re not… or you have habeas corpus. The hell is this limbo in between?
I know even here there is a lot of grey areas in this subject and some shaky legal foundations to safety measures for people who can’t look after themselves, but… yeah, this seems messed up. More messed up than the baseline level of messed up around this thing.
Taking money from the already incredibly underfunded public service doesn’t seem like a great solution, but sure if you really want your payday, go for it. It’ll measurably make things worse, but you do you! However, if you want to see how to “sue the shit out of the government” in a productive manner, look up the trueblood lawsuit in Washington State.
Look, I’ll confess I’m pretty drunk right now and I’m sure I’ll regret being hostile to you in the morning. But you sound like a very decent person who, and thank your lucky stars for this, has no idea what you’re talking about. Habeas Corpus is the right to file a type of legal petition, for one thing. It’s not suspended during this process, you can file one to the court in response to this, and the jurisdiction will rule on it. However, in every jurisdiction I am familiar with, that petition would be thrown out unless you had evidence of gross misuse of the process. That’s because the patients aren’t being denied any of their rights during proper execution.
(I just wanna be clear that I’m not breaking this down point-by-point because I’m trying to rebut you, I’m just trashed and can’t remember what I’m talking about without the quotes there to read. You ask some very reasonable questions, too, that are worth highlighting.)
Again, Habeas Corpus doesn’t work like that. This is a situation where the detention is wholly proper. And the confusion here is that you are being held on essentially evidential suspicion of being a risk. We can’t just let suicidal people go if there’s more reason to believe they’re going to kill themselves than not, that’s not how anything works. And we can’t say “oh, seems like you’re fine nvm fam” if you recently met the criterion to qualify for involuntary commitment and just let you go. That’s equally irresponsible. It’s a shitty situation. Once you’re in the system, it’s a moral gridlock until someone actually qualified to deal with the problem can finally get to you.
Unfortunately, forensic mental health evaluations require a highly skilled and certified practitioner to carry them out, and it turns out that there are fucking few of those that stick around in shithole places like Mississippi. Hell, even in the nice states there’s barely more than a handful of people qualified to carry these reviews out. One commonly proposed solution is, of course, to lower the certification requirements so the cops themselves can do the evaluation. I’m sure we all think that’s a great idea. The other, better solution is to train more people to be able to do these evaluations. We’re working on that. There are dozens of new medical schools focusing on mental health that have been built in the past several years, but the effect they have will be slow. Shit sucks.
Decent question. There are evaluatory criterion that must be met before the medical practitioner / law enforcement officer / other duly authorized authority can place someone under an official involuntary mental health restriction. It’s a checklist, it’s not very ambiguous, and it’s quite hard to actually meet all the criteria if you’re not actually at risk. However, just like ‘swatting’, I’m sure this could be abused by a determined enough asshole. People suck. There’s measures in place to prevent it’s abuse, so it’s much more difficult than ‘swatting’ someone, but there you go.
My initial reaction is to tell you to fuck off, but that’s just because I see this sentiment constantly and it’s deeply frustrating. They are providing adequate service within their means. In fact, every facility in the country is operating far above their theoretical maximum capacity. How the fuck are they supposed to do more than they are right now? It’s not some “oh lazy staff” situation or whatever, the capacity of these facilities is dictated in large part by the fire codes. Most facilities are building new ward capacity, but building large buildings takes a great deal of time. And while that’s going on, the staff at these facilities have to deal with being assaulted every single day. They still show up to do this work because it’s important. But yeah, go off about how the “service” is “inadequate”. Fucking hell. The existing medical facilities are unable to handle the incredible strain put on them. The fuck are they supposed to do? I’m seriously asking because fuck if I have a good answer to this.
No argument here, though I’d say that this is well beyond ‘messed up’. This system is a gigantic, flaming dumpster fire. Unfortunately it’s wildly misunderstood and 2/3 of the country are standing around actively pouring gasoline onto it in either a malicious attempt to destroy the whole dumpster or a well-meaning attempt to extinguish the flames that hinges on the flawed belief that because water extinguishes fire, and water is a liquid, clearly all liquids must extinguish fires.
It’s great. We’re all going to die.
Heh, drunken rebuttals are so much better when they’re acknowledged as one. It really takes the edge off.
Alright, for one, I am not in the US or a US citizen, so a lot of my shock comes from there. For what it’s worth, I have not engaged with these processes in the US at all and here not professionally, but I did learn them because of life reasons. And like I said last time, it is messed up here too, in that some of the reasonable terms and limits to restricting someone’s autonomy and free movement do get suspended in a very weird grey area when precautionary measures, including for medical reasons, are established. Full judicial review can take years here, too, and cautionary measures can stand in place for that whole period. Just to ground the conversation a little.
However, over here before you get detained indefinitely for any reason, and yes, being suicidal counts, you still need that to get cleared by a judge. You can’t just hold a person for two weeks on the mere suspicion that they may harm themselves and not have a doctor or a court make a decision on whether there is reason for that. So already I am way out of my comfort zone in terms of constitutional guarantees at play here. Once you find somebody dead while that process is happening we’re in “maybe we need this to change right away” territory. When that happens a dozen times you mostly just set it all on fire and start over.
Now, on the specifics, I do have some questions for you, if you’re drunk enough to still pay attention to this thread.
One is that I’m a bit confused about the dfiference between being held pending evaluation and having a checklist of evaluatory criteria. Because it seems to me that if the actual evaluation is taking so long to happen that people are dying in the process then the checklist is the de facto evaluation. What’s the difference between that and letting the cops make the call? Which yeah, terrible idea, but… you know, if you just get there anyway through a loophole that seems like a problem.
For the record on the next thing, when I mean “whoever runs the institution” I mean whoever owns it, not the staff. I have no idea if this is all handled in public institutions (which is what I would expect here) or in private facilities (which is what I’d expect in the US, but maybe that’s my socialdemocracy bias). While we’re on this, I do take issue with the “don’t sue because the system is already underfunded” point. Those are two separate concerns, and if the impact is on the underfunded medical system then that’s a third problem. Asking victims (and this guy is dead, so… yeah, that’s the right word) to not seek compensation because the negligence is the result of more negligence in underfunding the system is not it. Of course these are all entirely hypothetical lawsuits, so who cares, but still.
Honestly, if you ask me what I’d do in that scenario… well, I’d get involved in the politics of it, which is what I’ve done in life when I bumped with that sort of stuff. I mean, the way I’m hearing it the main problem is funding and staffing. The way I see it, this is the still literally richest country on Earth. So yeah, the reaction must start with voting for anybody who will fix that by any amount and continue along a line that ends with locked down airports and food courts, like the French are doing today. Or at least with thousands of marches, like the Germans did a few weeks ago. I get it, half the US thinks that public services are evil (somehow), but holy shit, man, the camel’s back has to snap at some point.
Right?
Anyway, as a PS, you weren’t that hostile. For online forum rants that was maybe a 3/10. I’ve had way worse on accout of far less. If that makes you feel better, you’re a mellow drunken poster.