Richland County boosts care for inmates when they are incarcerated and after they leave.
By Dawn Hinshaw
The State
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Inmates at the Richland County jail are evaluated for needed mental health services when they arrive.
Nearly one in five of them get help while they’re incarcerated.
And after they serve their time, psychiatric patients continue to be monitored in hopes they’ll improve.
Those are among new standards that have earned the jail accreditation by the country’s leading advocates of jail health care.
That represents a turnaround for the county-run institution where, just three years ago, three mentally ill inmates died.
Now, 200 or more people each month get treatment for problems ranging from substance abuse to schizophrenia -- people who previously fell through the cracks, officials say.
“This is a terrific step and a great accomplishment,” said Edward Harrison, president of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.
Only four other S.C. jails have been accredited by the agency, which grew out of the American Medical Association. Lexington County is among them.
“It’s much better,” said Bill Lindsey, director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness S.C., which was critical of the jail’s performance three years ago.
Lindsey said he would give the jail a rating of three to four out of a possible five. “It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is quite good.”
John Brown said Richland County’s approach to having mental health professionals available to inmates daily is “very progressive.”
Brown, the director of crisis and forensic services at the Columbia Area Mental Health Center, said clients identified at the jail can continue getting care once they leave -- helping to break the cycle of jailing homeless people who are seriously mentally ill.
“There are a lot of counties in South Carolina where there’s not this kind of presence of mental health services at the jail,” Brown said. “That’s the key, to be on site.”
The jail houses 950 people, a county spokeswoman said.
And Brown said anywhere from 17 percent to 20 percent of inmates are taking psychiatric medicines.
His agency works at the jail through an agreement with the jail’s health care contractor, Correct Care Solutions. Two clinicians have face-to-face contact with 250 inmates each month. A psychiatrist also is available to them.
In addition to bolstering mental health services, jail standards call for inmates to be screened for health problems within two weeks of their incarceration.
A nurse is on site all the time. And those who complain of illness see a doctor within two days, jail director Ronaldo Myers said.
In the past three years, the number of full-time medical staff has more than doubled, to 34, Myers said.
The staff was at 16 in March of 2006, when Correct Care Solutions took over the jail’s health care management, officials said.
At that time, the county had just weathered an onslaught of bad publicity and expensive legal settlements involving three mentally ill inmates who died while in custody.
Two men hanged themselves. A third died from complications from hypothermia.
County Council fired the health contractor it had at the time, Prison Health Services, and struck a contract with the new, more expensive health care provider.
Correct Care’s services cost $2.78 million a year.
Councilman Greg Pearce, a retired state hospital administrator, said it’s money well spent.
“This company has worked with our local providers to strengthen the psychiatric component,” Pearce said. “Obviously, being accredited, it’s worked out.”
Harrison said the National Commission on Correctional Health Care accreditation should reassure the public that its money is being spent wisely and that residents who are incarcerated will receive “the necessary care.”
The commission is an alliance of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, lawyers and jail administrators who came together in the 1970s, hoping to improve the care provided in local jails.
Other accredited jails are in Beaufort and Charleston counties, along with a private detention health care center, the Columbia Regional Care Center, formerly Just Care.
Copyright 2009 The State