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EDITORIAL: Disgraceful neglect of mentally ill in jail

Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) - 9/4/2015

Sept. 04--THE HAMPTON -- Roads Regional Jail originally was formed to help reduce crowding in the region's municipal jails. But in the years after its opening in 1998, the facility "evolved into managing inmates with medical and mental health issues or disciplinary problems," according to the jail's website.

The sprawling complex, between Airline Boulevard and Interstate 264 in western Portsmouth, houses a majority of certain local cities' "inmates with severe medical and mental health needs and essentially serves as the medical and mental health correctional facility for the member cities."

That's an unsettling proposition, given the harrowing circumstances surrounding the death last month of a mentally ill Portsmouth man held there.

As The Pilot's Gary Harki reported, Jamycheal Mitchell had been jailed for four months on suspicion of trespassing and stealing $5 worth of snacks from a 7-Eleven when guards discovered his lifeless body in his cell on Aug. 19.

Court records show Mitchell, who was 24 when he died, had grappled with mental illnesses since his teenage years. In May, a judge declared Mitchell incompetent to stand trial and ordered him transferred to Eastern State Hospital, a residential treatment facility for the mentally ill.

But Mitchell was never transferred. Jail officials said the hospital didn't have an available bed. So the troubled young man was kept locked in a cell at the regional jail, where his physical health deteriorated.

Mitchell's aunt told The Virginian-Pilot that when she saw his body last month, he had lost significant weight, and "he looked so thin and frail." The attorney representing Mitchell's family said he may not have been taking his medication, and may not have been eating, and jail officials are unable to confirm whether he actually ate the food provided to him.

Worse, the attorney told Harki that Mitchell "spent the last weeks of his life with a severely swollen leg in a cell covered in his own feces and urine."

A jail official confirmed Mitchell received care at a hospital on July 30 but refused to give details. Lt. Col. Eugene Taylor III, assistant jail superintendent, also confirmed Mitchell's cell was often contaminated with urine and feces.

"He would create a condition in his cell where we would have to go in there and clean it up," Taylor told Harki.

Taylor also acknowledged it was possible that, as Mitchell's family attorney said, Mitchell could've consumed his own waste, putting him at risk of infection.

"If he puts his hands in feces and decides to eat, there is no indication that we would necessarily see that."

Perhaps. But it's not unreasonable to presume that officials at the region's primary jail for inmates with medical and mental health problems would understand that an individual deemed incompetent to stand trial is also incapable of making rational decisions.

Mitchell suffered from serious mental illness. A judge had ordered him transferred to a state facility, and that facility refused to take him for lack of space, a terrible and disgraceful consequence of Virginia's failure to provide services to fill the void left by the commonwealth's dismantling of its mental institutions.

More than 6,000 inmates at city and regional jails are mentally ill, and roughly half have serious mental illnesses, as Mitchell did.

And yet, even at a jail that bills itself as the region's best-equipped facility for inmates with poor mental or physical health, it's possible for a 24-year-old man to be subject to such a cruel fate. To be booked into a cell, declared incapable of understanding the effect of his actions, left to wallow in his own filth and die alone four months later.

If this is what one mentally ill man endures at a jail that specializes in handling inmates with such problems, what fate do other inmates face? And what of the inmates in lesser equipped jails?

Those are questions that Virginians would be rightly horrified to ponder. And for state authorities to answer.

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(c)2015 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)

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