OPINION: Idaho needs facility for ‘dangerously mentally ill’

This editorial was published in the Idaho Statesman of Boise.

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In May, Ross Edmunds, administrator of the Idaho Division of Behavioral Health, reported that Idaho has nine beds available for people civilly committed who are deemed “dangerously mentally ill.”

Those nine beds are housed in a secure mental health wing at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise.

“There’s certainly more than nine of them across the state,” Edmunds told the Idaho Behavioral Health Council. “So what we have to do every day ... is look at that group of people that have been determined to be dangerously mentally ill and which should be in the prison beds ... and then sometimes we have to figure out who’s the least dangerous of the dangerously mentally ill people and we try to move those to our state hospitals. And that’s not a perfect system.”

To say the least.

Mind you, we’re not talking about people who have committed a crime or even been charged with a crime. These are simply people who are considered by the courts to be a danger to society.

“Caring for them in a state prison is probably not the most therapeutic environment for them,” Edmunds said.

Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt agreed.

“When we talk about our secure mental health program at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution,” Tewalt told the council, “we are talking very much about an environment that was designed and intended to incapacitate, not to treat.”

To remedy the situation, Idaho Gov. Brad Little recommended $24 million for the Department of Health and Welfare for a secure, forensic 26-bed mental health facility to care for patients committed and determined dangerously mentally ill by Idaho courts.

But the facility didn’t make the cut among a list of projects approved by the Legislature’s budget committee, despite a $1.4 billion state budget surplus.

Just another year of the Legislature kicking the can down the road.

And it turns out that the state of Idaho has been kicking this can down the road for the past 70 years.

As reported by Audrey Dutton of ProPublica, as far back as 1954, Idaho officials have debated creating a state hospital for those considered “dangerously mentally ill,” or, as they phrased it in 1954, “criminally insane.”

The issue has come up chronically over the years since, including a brief unit run jointly by the departments of Health and Welfare and Correction from 1972 to 1976, according to ProPublica. But IDOC took over the program in 1976, over the objections of mental health advocates.

A facility was supposed to be built in 1978 but never was. Efforts to build a mental health facility have cropped up in the ’80s, ’90s and then again in 2008 before the Great Recession scuttled plans once again.

All to no avail.

Now, it looks as if Idaho is about to become the last state in the nation — what a shock — to continue the inhumane practice of putting people with mental illness in a prison without a criminal charge.

New Hampshire, the only other state that does this, according to ProPublica, just broke ground on a 24-bed secure mental health facility that will allow the state to end the same practice — but not before a patient died last spring.

Maybe that’s what it will take in Idaho.

After all, that seems to be the Gem State’s standard operating procedure: Wait until people die before taking any action.

Earlier this year, the Idaho Statesman reported that on a stretch of Idaho 55 to McCall, the Idaho Transportation Department failed to cut down dead and dangerous trees, one of which fell and killed a 13-year-old boy.

Other recent instances of Idaho’s government failures include a failure to shut down a home for troubled teen girls in northern Idaho; a failure to secure $15 million in federal funding for school lunches for Idaho’s neediest children; a failure to inspect nursing homes; an inability to protect immigrant sheepherders; and the deplorable conditions of several Idaho school buildings, which are crumbling and in disrepair.

Meanwhile, as we have pointed out before, Little has proposed, and the Legislature has approved, $2.7 billion in tax cuts and rebates over the past three years, all while these problems persist in our state.

Little has signaled that he intends to try again in the coming session, and the state’s Permanent Building Fund advisory council has put $25 million for the facility in its recommendations, according to ProPublica.

That’s promising, but we’d like to see Little make it a priority and call it out specifically in his State of the State address on Jan. 8.

It’s time for the Idaho Legislature to do what’s right, build this facility and put an end to the inhumane practice of incarcerating people experiencing mental illness who have not even been charged with a crime.

It’s never too late to do the right thing. Not even after 70 years.

TNS