"I heard screaming from a vehicle, and I approached the gentleman in the vehicle, and he got out and mentioned a firearm, and I just lost it," Marshall said. Marshall's current legal entanglement kicked off in 2014, when he assaulted a neighbor, according to Houston police. "It's like you're housing a recovering addict with current users," according to Marshall, who said he suffers from bipolar and schizoaffective disorders. The more serious aggravated crimes can net hundreds of days on the wait list, Lee said.Īnd that delay, spent in the restrictive environment of a jail mental health unit, is a grind for antsy inmates. "Your average Class A and B misdemeanors are probably spending around 60 to 70 days on the wait list." "Today, our longest on the list is 285 days and our shortest person has been on the list for 58 days," Lee said recently. After receiving treatment in a state hospital, he accepted a life sentence in a September plea deal in the death of sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth.įor those facing minor charges - such as trespassing or shoplifting - the wait for treatment can end up being longer than the sentence would have been in the first place. One of the county's most high-profile defendants stuck on the wait list was convicted killer Shannon Miles, who had been deemed incompetent to stand trial. "There are fewer beds for those types of people and they end up really waiting a long time." "The more severe the offense and the more dangerous the suspect, those are the very hard beds to get," Lee said. Mike Lee said the wait gets longer for the most dangerous suspects. "The forensic wait list is basically first come, first serve," Gulley said. Fewer beds are available to house maximum security offenders who, like Marshall, have been charged with causing serious bodily injury or worse. They are shipped to one of the state's 10 mental hospitals for treatment to make them competent to stand trial. Most of those on the wait list are suspects who have been deemed incompentent to stand trial. Often that treatment takes a matter of weeks or months, but sometimes it stretches on for years. Those are inmates who must receive treatment in a state hospital before they're deemed fit for release either to their homes or to an outpatient facility. Some wait-listed inmates, like Marshall, have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, or NGRI, as it's often abbreviated. "It's a shame when we have $11 billion in the rainy day fund that we're still operating with a shortage of forensic psychiatric beds." Some mental health professionals, jailers and legislators are heartened by $300 million in new funding the Legislature approved in its 2017 budget, but it's still not clear how far that will go toward fixing the problem. In the past two years, however, the wait list has ballooned dramatically, leading some inmates to languish behind bars for more than 200 days awaiting treatment. The dearth of so-called forensic beds has plagued the Texas criminal justice system for at least two decades, with bed space sinking by nearly 300 since the mid-1990s. County mental health agency hires new CEO
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