A clinical psychologist is being tapped to head Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the United States, county officials announced this week.
Nneka Jones Tapia, who was previously in charge of overseeing mental health strategy for the sheriff’s office, will take over as executive director later this month. According to the officials who announced the personnel move, Jones Tapia represents the first mental health professional to oversee a large jail in the United States.
In an interview with NPR, Jones Tapia said that her new appointment “sends a powerful message” as administrators work toward finding ways to provide better services for inmates struggling with psychological issues.
The move speaks to the fact that — as the prison population has skyrocketed and the funding for psychiatric facilities has dwindled — the criminal justice system is now inextricably intertwined with issues of mental health. In fact, at least 1,900 current inmates detained in Cook County have been identified as mentally ill.
“We’ve effectively become the largest mental health hospital in the country,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told ThinkProgress in a previous interview. Dart has repeatedly criticized the policies that have led to the criminalization of the mentally ill, saying that state and federal officials need to dedicate more resources to effective community-based mental health services.
Over the past several years, states have slashed billions of dollars of mental health funding, and the number of available psychiatric hospital beds has dropped to the lowest level since 1850. Many of people struggling with mood and psychotic disorders — like severe depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia — end up getting funneled into the prison system because they have nowhere else to go. And once they’re there, the prison guards charged with their care are often ill equipped to work toward rehabilitation, making them more likely to wind up back behind bars.
In Chicago specifically, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed six mental health clinics in 2012, a deeply unpopular move that sparked massive protests. At the time, the Chicago Mental Health Movement warned that the decision to close the clinics in order to save an estimated $2.3 million in the state budget was “risky, ill-conceived, and riddled with hidden costs.” Studies have found that it’s actually much cheaper in the long run to provide better mental health care that keeps people out of prison.
Jones Tapia has her work cut of for her. She cites the city’s recent clinic closures as one reason that, even as the overall number of inmates at Cook County has recently been on the decline, the number of mentally ill inmates hasn’t seen a similar drop.
“The city of Chicago is starting to work with us, but, you know, their history of closing the six mental health clinics has done us a disservice, and the number of hospitals that are willing to take people with mental illnesses is dwindling,” she told NPR. She added that the number of mentally ill people behind bars in Cook County is a “travesty.”