“Heavy coat on a hot day, shorts, red burnt skin. Steve spotted him months later at a gas station. He crouched outside all night, then disappeared. Steve took him to a treatment center in Cabazon, but he would not go in. He started poking holes in the wall with a pool cue and urinating on the furniture. “We’ve taken him to so many hospitals, they’re all jumbled together,” his brother Steve said in an interview.įor a time he lived in Steve’s guest house and was taking medication. John had spent those years in the homes of his parents in Arizona, a sister in Sierra Madre or a brother in Yucaipa, eventually wearing all of them out by stealing money, disappearing on cross-city walks or acting so bizarrely that they would have to check him into a hospital. But it would take another 14 years, probably more than a dozen psychiatric holds and at least 10 more criminal convictions in L.A., San Bernardino and Riverside counties before the court system would commit him to a conservatorship, its most powerful tool to help repeat offenders whose crimes result from mental illness. When John was convicted of his first criminal offense in Los Angeles County - an August 2000 charge of disorderly conduct - he was 24 and had emerging indications of his schizophrenia. John’s hospital stays most likely outnumber his trips to jail but were far shorter in duration and just as likely to end badly. While his criminal cases are recorded in electronic files for anyone to see, not even Maurer’s family members know definitively how many times he’s been checked into hospitals on psychiatric holds.īy piecing together what they know, however, they’ve drawn a sad parallel. “The state is using lots of involuntary holds that seem to add up to nothing more than more involuntary holds,” wrote researcher Alex Barnard of the New York University Department of Sociology in an upcoming report on California’s conservatorship practices.Īny treatment Maurer has received is hidden behind a shield of privacy laws. Patients released without treatment are often picked up again and again on new psychiatric holds. Clinicians are reluctant to take people off the street, knowing they will likely only be released after the 72-hour limit. That’s about a third of the estimated number needed, which means there are roughly three mentally ill people in jail and four on the streets for every one receiving extended clinical care.īecause those beds are always full, hospitals that receive patients committed on psychiatric holds have few options for follow-up care, distorting the entire system. County’s mental health system there are only about 1,700 beds in what are called sub-acute facilities, where patients can stay for a few days or months with psychiatric care. On a typical day, almost 40% of the jail population - about 5,000 inmates - are in need of mental health treatment, many waiting for months to regain competence to stand trial. County Jail is the treatment option of last resort. The nexus between mental illness and low-level crime means that L.A. County - about 7,000 - had a diagnosis of serious mental illness. A recent academic study found that at least 1 in 5 people engaged by outreach workers in L.A.
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