New York City Plans Focus on Mental Health in
Justice System
By MICHAEL WINERIP and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ DEC. 1, 2014
In an effort to reduce the growing number of inmates with mental health
and substance abuse problems in New York City’s jails, the administration of
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans on Monday to significantly expand
public health services at almost every step of the criminal justice process.
City officials, who are allocating $130 million over four years to the
project, said their goal was to break the revolving door of arrest,
incarceration and release that has trapped many troubled individuals in the
system for relatively minor, qualityoflife offenses.
The new plan will shift emphasis from punishment for minor crimes to
treatment.
The changes include tripling the size of both pretrial diversion
programs and the amount of resources devoted to easing the transition from
jail back into society. This would represent a significantly different approach
to criminal justice in the city, experts said. But they cautioned that nothing
of such scale had been tried by a municipality before, and that putting the
plan into effect would be difficult.
“I think this is what criminal justice looks like in the 21st century,” said
Elizabeth Glazer, the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator, who was a cochairwoman
of a task force of city officials and community leaders that
released a report on Monday detailing the changes. “Preventing crime is
about more than the police and more than about prosecutors and defenselawyers and courts.”
The overhaul in New York City comes at a time when police
departments across the country have faced scrutiny after several shootings
of unarmed individuals, many with mental illnesses.
In New York, the portion of inmates at the city’s jails who are mentally
ill has increased to nearly 40 percent in recent years, even as the overall
number of people incarcerated has shrunk.
Many of these inmates are socalled frequent fliers, constantly cycling in
and out of Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex. The task force report
identified more than 400 people who had been jailed at least 18 times in the
last five years, accounting for over 10,000 jail admissions during that
period. It said that 67 percent of these inmates had “a mental health need”;
21 percent were severely mentally ill, meaning they had diseases like
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; and 99 percent had a substance abuse
problem.
The task force’s report reads, in some ways, as an effort to moderate the
prevailing policing methods of the last two decades, in which large numbers
of people, including many who were homeless, were swept off the streets
and incarcerated for lowlevel crimes like fare beating, loitering and
trespassing.
Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, appears to be trying to forge a middle
ground, at a time when violent crime is at historic lows.
Twenty years ago, as crime in the city surged to record levels, Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, initiated a policy, known as broken
windows, to aggressively police qualityoflife offenses. More recently,
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a political independent, championed the use
of stopandfrisk tactics in neighborhoods where crime persisted.
With this plan, Mr. de Blasio is essentially seeking to continue the
aggressive policing of minor crimes, while seeking to keep many of the
offenders out of jail. The test will be whether the two approaches are
compatible and a low crime rate can be sustained.
Among the many innovations suggested by the task force is thedevelopment of community based dropoff centers, where police officers
with specialized training could bring people they have taken into custody for
minor crimes. The centers would “provide an option for people who need
neither to be held for arraignment on lowlevel charges nor emergency room
services,” the report said.
Each center would have detox services, beds for shortterm stays, and
case managers who could make referrals to existing programs in the
community. The first such center would be opened in fall 2015 in Manhattan
and the second in an unspecified borough in early 2016, the report said.
While Police Commissioner William J. Bratton served on the task
force’s executive committee, the success of several of the programs will
depend on the attitude of rankandfile police officers, who would need to
buy into such major changes.
The city also hopes to improve mentalhealth screening before
arraignment. At present, an emergency service worker assesses people for
serious physical ailments before they appear in court. Under the new plan, a
medical worker would screen for serious psychiatric problems and possibly
divert people from court to treatment programs.
Also planned is an expansion of supervised pretrial programs for lowlevel
offenders who might otherwise fail to make bail. The amount of people
the programs could serve would increase to 3,400 from the current capacity
of 1,100.
Each year, the mayor’s plan would provide community services for an
additional 4,100 inmates with serious mental illnesses who are being
discharged from jail. For a decade, the city has been under court order to
provide such services, but has repeatedly failed to meet basic standards set
by the court, including transportation to a residence or shelter, and referrals
for mental health treatment.
In April, Justice Geoffrey D. Wright, of State Supreme Court in
Manhattan, extended court oversight for two more years because the city
had again not met the basic standards.
Another major problem identified by the task force is the difficulty ofimmediately restarting Medicaid services for inmates; Medicaid coverage is
canceled by the state during incarceration. Without coverage, former
inmates cannot fill prescriptions to treat their mental illnesses.
City officials and criminal justice experts said various aspects of the de
Blasio administration’s plan had been put into effect by other cities, but
none of the other programs had been as ambitious.
“I don’t know of any other major city that has done something that is so
comprehensive,” said Jim Parsons, research director of the Vera Institute of
Justice.
Of the funds allocated to the project, $90 million will come from tax
revenues, and $40 million from the Manhattan district attorney’s asset
forfeiture fund. Whether or not that amount will be sufficient remains to be
seen, experts said.
“Until you try these initiatives, it’s hard to know exactly what kind of
investment will be needed,” Mr. Parsons said.
Inmate advocates, long critical of the city’s approach to criminal justice,
spoke highly of the new initiative.
“It’s a comprehensive plan that, if implemented, could have a
significant impact,” said Jennifer J. Parish, director of criminal justice
advocacy at the Urban Justice Center.
In February, Jerome Murdough, a 56 yearold veteran with
schizophrenia and a substance abuse problem, was found dead after a
heating malfunction drove the temperatures in his cell at Rikers to over 100
degrees. Mr. Murdough had been arrested for sleeping in the stairwell of a
publichousing project.
In October, the city paid his family $2.25 million to settle a wrongfuldeath
suit.
Mr. Murdough’s case is illustrative of many of the issues in the criminal
justice system that the de Blasio administration is now seeking to address.
“We see these frequent fliers, people who commit relatively small low
level offenses, cycling through the system over and over and over again,” Ms.
Glazer said. “And the question is, how do we stop that? Clearly what we’redoing now is not all that effective.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 2, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition
with the headline: City Is Planning Treatment Focus in Justice System.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
