By Hannah Sampson
The Miami Herald
MIAMI, Fla. — Ruth Myers supports herself with the help of her mother and friends and does odd jobs to get by, hanging awnings or tending to landscaping.
She suffers from a mental disability and has occasionally found herself in minor trouble with the law. She just wishes she had enough money for a little independence.
Before her federal disability benefits were suspended several years ago after she was jailed on a drug charge, she said she was getting $512 a month — enough at least to buy clothes and food.
“I was happy then,” she said Tuesday outside the mobile home in Davie where she lives.
BENEFITS LOST
Myers, 32, is one of an estimated 500 disabled people a year in Broward who lose their Social Security or other federal disability benefits when they go to jail.
But after being incarcerated, like many others released from jail, she failed to reapply to have her benefits reinstated and has been living day-to-day.
Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein is now asking Sheriff Al Lamberti to set up a process so that inmates will get the help they need to reapply for their benefits before their release.
In a Jan. 9 letter, Finkelstein urged the sheriff to enter into an agreement with the Social Security Administration to streamline the process of getting benefits reinstated.
“The situation created by delays in reinstatement leads to a deterioration of medical and psychiatric conditions, homelessness and rearrests,” he wrote. “All of this is needless and inhumane.”
Finkelstein pointed out that the administration sends BSO money — between $200 and $400 per inmate -- once someone’s benefits have been suspended. He said the agency has an obligation to help those same people get their benefits back. That money goes to the county.
The issue will be taken up Wednesday at a mental health task force meeting at the public defender’s office in Fort Lauderdale.
Broward Sheriff’s Office spokesman Elliot Cohen said that the agency tried unsuccessfully to set up such an agreement with Social Security in 2003. He said that now, jail staffers offer to help inmates get an expedited appointment with the Social Security Administration once they are released.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE
But Cohen said BSO often does not even know if someone’s benefits are suspended until after the person is already released.
If the SSA decided to send workers to the jails to help put a better system in place, Cohen said, they would not be turned down.
‘We would throw open the doors, give them a cup of coffee and say ‘Come on in,’ ” he said. “We would welcome Social Security putting someone in our jails to help expedite the process.”
A spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration, Patti Patterson, said many institutions have agreements to help inmates apply for benefits for the first time or have them reinstated, though not Broward’s jails. An exact number was not available.
Frederick Goldstein, an attorney who has worked on mental health issues, is trying to help Myers get her benefits reinstated. He said many people who get released from jail are focused on surviving each day and struggle to go through the process required to get their benefits back.
“Weeks turn into months, months turn into years and here we are,” he said.
Copyright 2008 The Miami Herald