BANGOR – More than 16 months after Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross made a very public plea for help with a rising number of inmates with mental health issues, the sheriff said Tuesday that progress has been made, but more is still needed.

A broad support system is in the works with efforts under way to provide inmates the mental health services they need while incarcerated. The system would also provide services once they are released and would attempt to divert them from the jail in the first place.

“Now when something happens, I don’t feel alone,” Ross said Tuesday before a meeting of the Jail Diversion Committee, a group that meets monthly and represents mental health service providers and law enforcement agencies.

The issue of mental health problems is a far-reaching one, a survey of Maine jails several years ago showed that 35 percent to 60 percent of inmates had mental health issues, Carol Carothers, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Maine, said Tuesday.

Since its inception about a year ago, the committee has sought to increase services and fill gaps in mental health services for inmates. One problem has been getting people back on track after they served their time. In the jail, inmates lose Medicaid, disability payments and other social services that can take time to resume once they are released.

Often they have no jobs and may not have a roof over their heads, Mark Hedger, an adult mental health program manager with Community Health and Counseling Services, said before the meeting. That is changing, with CHCS helping inmates hook up with services before they leave the jail.

“Now we can have an impact with someone and start working with them before they are released,” he said.

In another step forward, members of the Bangor Police Department and corrections and patrol officers with the sheriff’s department have been trained in crisis intervention. The idea is that these officers can identify someone in a mental health crisis and help direct them to needed services rather than take them to jail.

Ross had been in office just 20 months when he held a press conference in late April 2004 calling attention to the problem that was overloading the system, sapping his budget and not meeting the needs of the inmates, leaving them in dangerous predicaments.

Despite progress being made, some things haven’t changed.

The week before the press conference, a Penobscot County Jail inmate tried to kill himself an eighth time after the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta refused to take him.

In August, a 19-year-old man spent five weeks in the Penobscot County Jail despite repeated suicide attempts, Denise Noll, an Acadia Hospital mental health clinician contracted by the Penobscot County Jail, told the committee. Riverview refused to take him, she said.

Noll has tried five or six times in the past 16 months to get inmates hospitalized at Riverview, formerly the Augusta Mental Health Institute, but each time has been turned away, she said.

For Ross it was all too familiar.

“This sounds very similar to the event that led to the formation of this committee,” said Ross who added that the biggest challenge is now finding bed space in appropriate facilities.

“Jails across the state have inmates that need to be stabilized in a forensic institution,” Ross said before the meeting.