Lawmakers are calling for sweeping changes to improve how the state handles people who have been deemed too dangerous to live in the community unsupervised.
The special study committee was formed as part of a law was passed last spring in response to a very specific problem: The state was spending large sums of money — more than $300,000 in a few cases — to watch over a small number of people with mental impairments who are living in the community and are considered to be a “risk to public safety.”
The issue came to bear when the Agency of Human Services (AHS) terminated funding for new people who fit this profile, citing out-of-control costs. AHS will continue to pay for 22 individual budgets until the end of fiscal year 2014.
The people in question defy categories and don’t fit neatly into any mental health funding stream. They are afflicted by wide range of impairments, ranging from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they’ve been classified in different ways — as having “serious functional impairments” if they’ve been incarcerated, or “complex community cases” if they haven’t.
The committee, which set out to find a better and less costly way to serve this population, found itself grappling with a much larger problem: how to keep people from landing in the criminal justice system because of their mental health issues.
Rep. Sandy Haas, P-Rochester, sits on the committee, and she spearheaded the legislation that created it.
“The impetus for the bill was that small group,” Haas said, “but the language of the bill was broader by design because we knew there were a lot more people we needed to address.”
Rather than continuing to funnel money into individual budgets for people — some of have been incarcerated, others have no criminal record — lawmakers decided that the state should invest in “upstream” resources to make sure they don’t end up in prison.
Lawmakers homed in on several programs they think should be replicated statewide. Among them are mental health treatment courts and Chittenden County’s Rapid Intervention program, which sends people who have been arrested to treatment before charges are filed against them.
The committee is also recommending that the state develop a uniform way of assessing the public safety risk that these people pose. Many of the “designated agencies” — community providers that receive AHS funding to care for people with mental impairments — make those determinations and they have different methods for doing that. The committee is also encouraging AHS to offer “performance-based” grants that will reward designated agencies for successfully keeping people out of prison.
Legislators say their recommendations — which have been compiled into a report that will be handed off to the committees of jurisdiction at the start of the next legislative session — are a good start, but they only scratch the surface of the problem.
“There’s a lot more work and discussion that has to go from this point forward,” Sen Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, said.
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, put it this way: “This committee didn’t solve it, but we’ve gone a long ways to understanding the challenges this populations faces.”
The committee mulled over some more concrete, immediate solutions — the construction of a secure residential facility or a treatment facility housed on prison grounds for people still incarcerated — but it didn’t end up endorsing those options. The report states that the state should wait to see whether interventions “at the front end of the system” are effective before making any large investment in a new facility.
AHS officials praised the committee’s recommendations, but they also made it clear that these “upstream” services wouldn’t take care of everyone.
Dr. Dee Burroughs-Biron, health services director for the Department of Corrections, told lawmakers, “We have now a group of individuals who would meet none of the criteria for the front end, middle, any of these services. There is always going to be a certain group of people who are not going to be amenable to the front-end services.”