Jail Alternatives

The murder last month of Colby student Dawn Rossignol was a horrible tragedy. The fact that her accused killer, Edward Hackett, knew that he should not be out of jail because he could commit such a crime makes her death even harder to take.

Fingers were first pointed at a parole system that allowed Mr. Hackett to come to Maine to live with his parents after being released from a Utah prison for kidnapping a woman. A review of the reciprocal parole system, completed last week, found that it worked as it was supposed to.

The problem goes much deeper than Mr. Hackett’s being allowed to come to Maine. The problem is that a growing number of inmates in county jails, state prisons and federal penitentiaries suffer from mental illness. Mr. Hackett served two years of his 15-year sentence for kidnapping a woman from a Salt Lake City parking garage in 1992 at a Utah mental hospital. At his first parole hearing in 1995, he said he did not want to be paroled to the outside world, but sent instead to the state mental hospital.

During his second hearing in March 2002, Mr. Hackett said that after years of being overmedicated or undermedicated, he felt his current medicine was working well. He was released on parole and came to Maine six months ago. State corrections officials, citing a confidentiality policy, are not saying whether Hackett received therapy during his time here as he had requested.

In a chilling interview with the Portland Press Herald last week, in which he admitted killing Ms. Rossignol,

Mr. Hackett explained why he should not have been free. “There’s just no way for someone like me to fit into a society like yours. I’m the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Sure, I wanted out [of jail]. I wanted out really bad. But I knew I shouldn’t be let out. I am definitely going to make sure your system does not let me out again.”

In the country with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world and the highest murder, rape and robbery rates in the developed world, it is clear that our corrections system is not working. This is true at all levels.

Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross has desperately asked the state to help him deal with mentally ill inmates at the county jail. On a single day last month, two inmates attempted suicide while being held there. Nationally, correctional facilities house eight times as many mentally ill people as do state psychiatric facilities.

Compounding the problem is the fact that well over half of inmates have drug and alcohol abuse problems. So, in effect, jails have become detoxification facilities, too.

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There are no easy answers to this situation. Life in a mental hospital is not the answer, but neither is life in jail, which, by the way, is much more expensive than other treatment settings. Clearly, more detoxification facilities are needed. Studies have found that long-term residential facilities have the highest rate of success. There are no such facilities in Maine and the short-term programs that do exist have long waiting lists. More psychiatric facilities are also needed, especially for those in correctional institutions. The 17 beds to be set aside at the new hospital in Augusta for this purpose are not nearly enough.

Changing the current situation where jails have taken the place of mental hospitals and detox facilities will take time and commitment. The Baldacci administration knew this early on and properly appointed a commission on corrections to review the state’s incarceration system. It has met three times so far and is expected to meet three more times before offering recommendations to the Legislature. While the treatment of the mentally ill is part of the commission’s purview, the issue is so complex that it deserves a separate commission to explore it at greater length.

Maine is not alone in its question of how best to treat this population. It may be that a multi-state system of care and confinement makes more sense than any state acting on its own. The courts in other states may have offered direction on what level of constraint is permissible. Regional cooperation is also more likely to attract federal support for any reform chosen. The public has much to learn from such a commission, and examining these ideas is essential to building public endorsement. Because from cost and societal points of view, offering secure treatment outside the current system of more cell blocks is a far better option.