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Data deficit: Oversight of jails fragmented

The Record-Eagle - 3/10/2020

Mar. 8--TRAVERSE CITY -- Who is incarcerated in Michigan's county jails, their length of sentence, and how many die there is unknown -- and it has been that way for decades.

Policymakers say they're taking steps to fix this broken system, but with little data to go by, responding to the mental health needs of those in county jails is like working in the dark.

"There is a lot of data and information that we can collect -- and that we should collect -- so we can have a more holistic understanding of how people are losing their lives in jail," said Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist in a phone interview Thursday.

"But it's not just for people who are losing their lives in jail," Gilchrist added. "There have been jail systems that are not consistently collecting data on identity, such as race and ethnicity, which made it difficult to have aggregated stats that could be cross-sectioned across the state."

Gilchrist and state supreme court Chief Justice Bridget McCormack co-chaired the state's 2019 Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration, formed at the governor's request to shine a light on the system.

After a review of Bureau of Justice Statistics records showed county jail populations have nearly tripled in the state, the 21-member Task Force was created to figure out what was going on and pose solutions.

Recommendations were released in January. One was to standardize criminal justice data collection and reporting across Michigan.

"That feels important to us if we're ever going to measure whether these proposed reforms, or any other reforms, are succeeding in achieving their goals," McCormack said. "I think standardized data collection is the precursor to any standardized oversight."

The state currently has neither.

There is no repository of data, maintained over time, of the state's county jail population. Not even for criminal justice insiders, who say they could use it.

"That was a big problem identified by the Task Force," said Chris Gautz, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Corrections. "We don't have access to any numbers to know who is in jail and who isn't."

MDOC just released the state's 2016-2019 prison recidivism rate -- just under 27 percent -- which, on paper, shows a big drop from the 40 percent rate a decade ago.

The Department's Research and Planning division tracked 9,922 prison parolees between 2016 and 2019, crunched the numbers and announced Michigan has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country.

They were not able to include numbers of parolees who re-offended and were sentenced to jail, not prison, because no one knows what those numbers are.

"We can run a LEIN (a state or national searchable database for law enforcement), and find out, but that would mean running LEINs on 9,000 prisoners and we just don't do that," Gautz said.

It isn't only state-level officials who say they could use better data on jail inmates.

In November, a Record-Eagle reporter asked Grand Traverse County Sheriff Tom Bensley for a representative snapshot of the inmate population in the Grand Traverse County's jail.

Bensley said jail staff could easily access records for individual inmates, and that he would try to find out more about the overall inmate population.

For example, what percentage of inmates were pre-trial, what percentage were parole violators and what percentage were serving sentences levied by the court.

Bensley was able to obtain the figures, but only for one day, and only after several hours of work by a corrections sergeant.

"We've asked the county for an updated system. So far, they have not seen clear to put it in the budget," Bensley said.

Sheryl Kubiak, dean of the Wayne State University school of social work, has spent her career researching the intersection of criminal justice and heath care. She served on the Task Force with Gilchrist and McCormack.

Improving outcomes for inmates, connecting them with services and giving corrections officers the information they need requires an intake system that asks the right questions, Kubiak said.

There are a variety of jail management software programs available to purchase, with little uniformity from county to county, Kubiak said. The software is expensive and takes training to learn how to use, making it difficult for jail administrators to justify changing even if their current system is not as effective as they'd like.

"In the best case scenario, there would be a uniform system that all the jails would use," Kubiak said in a telephone interview. "But to require that, the state would have to fund it. And that would be a big ticket item."

Some jails, such as Kalamazoo County, are paper and pencil, Kubiak said, with no jail management information software at all.

Nor is there a robust oversight mechanism to make sure county jails are operating as they should.

Gautz said the MDOC's County Jail Services Unit certifies county jails, which means they do things like count smoke detectors, measure the temperature of food in walk-in refrigerators and freezers and make sure emergency exits are well-marked.

Sometimes MDOC staff visits the jail to conduct an audit, and sometimes jails self-report, Gautz said.

MDOC staff does not investigate claims of wrong-doing in jails or train corrections officers.

"It's not oversight in the sense of, if somebody complains and says my son or daughter is in jail and being mistreated, we don't investigate that," Gautz said. "It's not in our constitutional mandate. What we do is more policy-driven."

The Task Force met six times between July 2019 and January. In September, members were briefed by the Pew Charitable Trusts on admission and length of stay samples provided by 20 Michigan sheriffs.

Kubiak said her own research and Pew's presentation made it clear that any form of centralized oversight -- whether added to the MDOC's responsibilities or by some other entity -- has inherent obstacles.

"We've been working pretty closely with jails in 21 counties and there's no two that are alike," Kubiak said. "So it's very, very difficult to standardize or regulate. It's not a one size fits all."

Jails do have one thing in common. They've become warehouses for the mentally ill.

"The state made a poor choice to disenfranchise our mental health support structure a generation ago," Gilchrist said. "The result of that was ballooning our jail population ... we haven't provided those services at the state level. We have instead put our jail administrators and law enforcement in a terrible position to be those front line health officials."

Estimates are that by 2014, 10 times more people with a serious mental illness were in the nation's jails and prisons than in state mental hospitals, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that works to improve access to mental health treatment.

The lack of adequate care for the mentally ill can be traced to the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 that was to replace mental institutions with federally-funded, community-based mental health centers.

The CMHA was put in place to address inhumane treatment of people with mental illnesses in institutions and created a financial incentive for state hospitals to close. But funding for the community centers that were to provide inpatient and outpatient services never fully materialized.

Reforms to commitment laws were later enacted, making it much more difficult to commit someone to an institution. The reforms went a long way in protecting the rights of the mentally ill, but led to more hospital closures.

The Traverse City State Hospital closed in 1989 after several years of declining use.

With its 140-year history, the Michigan Sheriffs Association does not do extensive inmate data collection or oversight of jails, but did support the Task Force and has filled other needs.

The nonprofit organization provides its members with education and training opportunities, staffs a mission team to respond to jail suicide death investigations and offers a members-only Listserv -- discussion group -- where sheriffs and others in law enforcement can ask their colleagues for confidential advice.

"Jail and mental health is the No. 1 issue right now on that,"said MSA Executive Director Blaine A. Kóóps.

"We had one sheriff who had an inmate waiting for a forensic bed for more than 600 days," Kóóps said. "That's not justice. Michigan can do better."

Record-Eagle reporter Patti Brandt Burgess contributed to this story

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