Miami county aims to help mentally ill arrestees

An alternative to jail, soon-to-open facility will treat defendants instead of incarcerating them

- BRITTANY WALLMAN

Special locks and handles to keep staff and inmates safe are used throughout the new Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery. But whether the one-of-a-kind facility to help defendants with mental illness will open its doors this year is an unsettled question.

This could be the year Miami-Dade County makes history, opening a centre for treating and helping — instead of incarcerating — people with mental illness. It is thought to be the first of its kind in the country.

But delay upon delay upon delay — so much bureaucracy it’s hard to blame any one thing — mean that the planned Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery is slated to open some 20 years after it first was promised.

Many of those who will be helped are chronically homeless. Most have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. Many abuse drugs or alcohol. All of them find themselves in and out of jail, at great cost to taxpayers, after being accused of committing non-violent crimes. They’re largely invisible to society, except when they cause problems.

An alternative to jail, the centre will be a place judges can send nonviolent defendants accused of misdemeanours or low-level felonies instead of locking them up. Police could take potential arrestees there instead of booking them in to the jail.

Offering the gamut of services a person might need to turn their life around, the centre represents a starkly more humane approach than the neglectful, abusive treatment federal authorities documented in Miami-Dade jails as recently as 2011.

If it opens this year, the centre will be the crowning achievement of Judge Steven Leifman’s career.