The Department of Children and Families is failing to meet its responsibility to transfer mentally ill inmates from jail cells to hospitals.
A Times Editorial
Published September 27, 2006
In ignoring its responsibility to treat desperately disturbed souls who are trapped in jail cells, the Florida Department of Children and Families offends not only the standards of common decency. It violates state law. It also ignores court orders.
Is DCF simply above the law?
Those who work inside the criminal justice system in Pinellas and Pasco are asking just such questions. In court last week, an irritated Circuit Judge Crockett Farnell said: "It's a tragic situation. The folks affected by this are the most unfortunate we've got." Public Defender Bob Dillinger was at wit's end: "That's arrogance. To blatantly have a government agency ignore an order - that has to be addressed."
Who will address it? The law specifically requires DCF to transfer mentally ill inmates to a state mental hospital within 15 days. But the agency seldom meets that deadline. One mentally disturbed man with no prior record recently spent five months in jail on a drug possession charge because DCF wouldn't transfer him and the judge deemed him too disturbed to be released into the community. Another man gouged his own eye out while waiting for a transfer and treatment.
DCF's attorney says his agency doesn't have the money to provide enough hospital beds to meet the demand. That's passing the buck to the Legislature, except that DCF's own budget request for 2006-07 sought a reduction of $53-million. That money alone could have eliminated the waiting list statewide. Can you plead poverty when you asked to be poor?
A Miami-Dade grand jury issued a report last year that called attention to the mental health crisis in this state and the extent to which jails have become the unintended dumping ground. "Florida's local jails have become the largest public psychiatric hospitals," the report stated, "housing five times more people with mental illnesses than the state's psychiatric institutions."
For the well-being of those patients and safety of their communities, that trend has to be reversed. In the meantime, Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature have to take responsibility for those who now languish in jails long after the law requires the state to intervene. DCF cannot be allowed to stand above the law.
