By Noah Zahn
Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — When Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak took office in 2022, he said one of his friend’s sons was in custody at the jail.
“He was a severely mentally ill person, he was in custody and just deteriorating,” Kozak said. “I heard from my friend about the frustrations he had, and so I was like, ‘We’ve got to do something about this in the future.’ So that’s what led to this.”
Over the past three years, staff at the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office have been preparing to open a new pod of 25 cells — 15 for men and 10 for women — catered toward helping the most severe cases of mental illness in the jail.
Currently, those inmates are housed in cells in the jail’s booking room. This allows 24-hour monitoring in an artificially lit room with check-ins every 15 minutes or so, especially for the inmates on suicide watch. It is not uncommon for visitors and staff to hear screams and obscenities in the room when they pass through.
By Monday, those inmates will be transferred to the new $700,000-plus pod of cells that focuses on supporting the inmates’ mental health.
The new section of the downtown Cheyenne facility is designed to be a more calming environment. The walls are painted purple and green, the furniture is softer and filled with sand to prevent anyone from throwing it, and there is a sun-lit outdoor space.
When walking into the pod, it could be easy to mistake the Plexiglas walls and door to the outdoor recreation area as a window viewing the outside, as the walls are painted with a mural of the Cheyenne skyline.
Painter Jordan Dean took pictures from the top of the jail to replicate how the skyline would look from that viewpoint and re-created that on the cement block walls.
“My goal in this is that when they come out here, it’s like you’re sitting at a rooftop patio overlooking the city of Cheyenne,” said Chief Deputy Perry Rockvam, who has been leading the efforts to create the new mental health-focused pod in the jail.
“Hopefully with this, it brings it more to a human level, and it’s not so institutionalized.”
The mural in the women’s recreation area depicts the rock formations of Vedauwoo.
Additionally, there are cameras in each cell to monitor the condition of the inmates 24 hours a day, and the beds are not made of metal. In the rest of the jail, there are only cameras in the public areas of the pods.
More suicide prevention measures include metal bars along the stairs and shower curtain rods that could not sustain a hanging.
Donelle Hiltner is the mental health coordinator for LCSO. Her team works to create medical treatment programs for inmates. She said the new pod is more treatment-focused than correctional-focused.
“Although these people are incarcerated, our goal is to make this feel as little like a jail as possible. We want to really create an individualized treatment plan that’s going to help people to minimize recidivism. That’s the ultimate goal, to help people,” she said.
She said a Zen jail is a safe jail, at the end of the day — safer for the inmates, the professional staff, the medical team and the deputies.
Nowhere else to go
For one reason or another, the burden of care for Laramie County’s mentally ill criminals has largely fallen to LCSO.
Kozak said some of the people detained in the jail should not be there, and would receive more proper care and rehabilitation at the Wyoming State Hospital .
The only state-owned psychiatric hospital in the state is located near Evanston and has 104 beds. Rockvam said it can take months or years for someone on the waitlist for the hospital to be transferred there.
“The numbers at the State Hospital, you know, they can’t support what’s happening in the state ... so then the burden is on us,” he said. “So is it truly our responsibility, and should the county be covering those costs and having to care for these inmates? That’s something that we’re working on right now with the Department of Health to try and look at.”
He said that includes figuring out how the state can reimburse LCSO for taking on a responsibility that should be theirs. Kozak agreed that it should be the state’s responsibility, and said he hopes to receive reimbursements in the future.
Inmates suffering from mental illness may have turned to illegal substance abuse to self-medicate and ended up in jail. Some inmates may get stuck in a cycle of going in and out of the jail by a lack of support for things like addiction treatment and securing housing.
There are medically assisted treatment programs available that LCSO supports for inmates, but Kozak said many inmates’ mental and physical health deteriorates in the current system to treat mental illness in the jail.
LCSO leadership is unsure of the best way to address this, especially with a lack of support from the state, but he hopes this new pod will be a step in the right direction to adequately support inmates suffering from mental illnesses.
“If you commit a crime, we’re going to come get you,” Kozak said. “... But once you come here, then you see our kindler, gentler self. Our goal is to find out what the underlying cause of that crime is, and if it’s drug addiction, if it’s mental health, get you the resources you need, so hopefully you don’t ever come back to our jail again.”
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