HCSO Major Mike Lee, who has been with the Houston Police Department for 27 years and also has been the lead in Office of Mental Health Policy and Jail Diversion Projects, said there has been a lack of connection between the different approaches in the past to aid mentally ill inmates.

Lee said he believes more organizations should come together to address the issue of mental health care.

He said the sheriff’s office already works as a partner with the Harris Center for Mental Health to provide case management to mentally ill individuals. The combined effort has reduced the number of police encounters with the cases of continual problematic mentally ill individuals by 70 percent to 80 percent.

“We wanted to connect the dots better,” Lee said. “Because we might do outreach with [HCSO’s Homeless Outreach Team], and that person would come through our jail. We want to look at training where we can improve.”

First steps

The first 120 days of the Office of Mental Health Policy and Jail Diversion will include assessment of the available resources and what policies are being incorporated, Gonzalez said.

Every day the price of incarcerating individuals costs the county hundreds of dollars a day, Gonzalez said.

“It is not an effective use of resources. We’re giving this 120 days to really come and see where the biggest needs, obstacles and challenges are,” he said.

After 120 days, a new phase of development in the program begins that will extend to 180 days to reassess the next needs of the program.

Gonzalez stressed that while the Harris County sheriff’s office has always targeted crime, what has been missing is compassion toward the mentally ill.

“When we’re talking about public safety, we always want to be tough on crime, but I think we’ve missed historically is the compassionate side of things,” he said.

Lee said inadequate mental health care in the jail is an opportunity for the sheriff’s office to analyze the situation and produce new ideas to address the issue of mental health in the jails.

This is not an area of law enforcement that police officers sign up for, but these are symptoms of broken systems in our society, such as inadequate mental health care in the community, Lee said.

“People who get off their medications find themselves in trouble and end up in jail,” he said. “So we can either ignore the problems or acknowledge that we have a role that we have to play. And unfortunately that role has increased, and it’s a huge problem. So we can stick our heads in the sand and ignore it or come up with innovative ways to address it more effectively, more efficiently and more humanely.”

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said it is going to take funding to improve the mentally ill individuals in the Harris County jail.

“The legislature keeps saying this is now a priority,” he said. “They are now talking about taking it statewide because that makes all the sense in the world, but it take as paradigm shift in funding, which will save a lot of money on criminal justice and have a better outcome.”

Emmett said he is optimistic because he believes it is now widely known that getting the mental health issues out of the jail is in everyone’s interest. He said mental is is his No. 1 priority. 

“If we know who those people are and can identify them, then why do we keep reputting them in jail?” he said.

Emmett said the county has run the numbers of the mentally ill inmates that have been rearrested and found the number in the thousands.

“What we’re doing now is really an innovating approach that is the first of its kind in the country,” Gonzalez said. “We’re really excited about that because it’s never been done in a holistic way. [All entities] are going to start interfacing with each other.”