She Needed Help Not Prison

 

She Needed Help Not Prison

By Bill Barksdale, Columnist

The other day I was listening to an interview with the gifted young attorney, Brittany K. Barnett, on Public Radio’s program Fresh Air.  Ms. Barnett’s book A Knock At Midnight has been named the Best Book of 2020 by Amazon.com.  She’s been responsible for getting Presidents Obama and even Trump to commute the sentences of several people who committed non-violent crimes and were sentenced to unusually harsh punishments.  One such person was Ms. Barnett’s own mother, a registered nurse who became addicted to crack cocaine.  Once released from her incarceration, she was clean and sober and returned to nursing specializing in helping others with drug abuse issues. 

One thing that particularly caught my attention in Ms. Barnett’s interview was her comment about her Mother.  “She needed help, not prison.”  Former Mendocino County sheriff, Tom Allman, has said this many times regarding inmates in County jail.  That was the reason tax payers voted to tax ourselves with the Measure B initiative – to help fund solutions and urgently needed help for people with mental illness, of which substance abuse is one.  Incarceration costs tax-payers much more than effective therapy and rehabilitation.

About five years ago Tom Allman spearheaded an intensive campaign to pass Measure B.  Measure B’s intended purpose was to create a much needed support system for our County’s mental health system and its overworked, underpaid personnel.  Tommy warned time-and-again about how various County and local policing agencies had become the defacto caretakers for many people who are mentally ill and need help, not a prison cell. 

Unfortunately, the Measure B Advisory Committee, although peopled by some very well intentioned people – has failed it’s mission along with our County Board of Supervisors in respect to mental health care.  The Committee meets only two hours per month and has an unwieldly eleven members.  Millions have been spent on studies and acquisition of inadequate real estate to plan a facility that will treat less than ten people at a time while our County’s mental health needs increase exponentially. 

Currently the United States had the highest number of incarcerated individuals of any county in the world, with more than 2.12 million people in prison.  Number two on the list is China with well over a billion more people than the U.S.  The “prison for profit” system currently in place in the U.S. is in itself a crime – often literally with government sanctioned criminal behavior on the part of companies’ treatment of prisoners, many of those prisoners suffering from various mental illnesses.

County and city governments would do well to create general plans and tax incentives that encourage development of affordable housing, vocational training in schools for a changing work force, and effectively address our social and mental health issues.  Good planning creates targeted goals that focuses spending of scarce human resources and public funds. 

Many people are becoming homeless now, oftentimes because of our Covid-19 recession.  Old age, lost jobs, illness, children in need – these are not crimes.  Tax legislation that transfers trillions of working-class dollars to the super wealthy, political edicts that undermine Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid – these are genuine crimes.

Can you imagine what today’s medical personnel as well as service professionals are going through?  Burn out, Covid infection, separation from family.  Arrogant, angry people continue to go out in public without even wearing a mask.  They still have big gatherings, crowd airports and some religious facilities - spreading Covid19 and causing, currently, as many deaths each day in the U.S. as died at the World Trade Center – every day!

When my very loving Dad was very young, just age seventeen, he lied about his age and joined the Army.  After a few weeks of basic training he was shipped off to fight the war, World War II, in the Pacific.  He loved his country.  He never spoke about what happened to him in the war, but he suffered from depression and alcoholism for the rest of his life.  When I spoke with his nurse at the V.A. hospital during my Dad’s last days before he died the nurse said “Guys your Dad’s age are all dying of the same things.  Addiction to alcohol and tobacco.”  He forgot to mention chronic depression.

Should those guys have been locked up in prisons?  Many were.  Today many military veterans, both women and men, have returned from our country’s “endless war” profit machine to become homeless, suffering from traumatic brain injuries, depression, addiction, poverty and epidemic suicide.  They are often shamed for “not being man enough”.  

Many others growing up in poverty suffer from homelessness, hunger, poor education, stress, low self-esteem, the evils of prejudice, substance abuse, and chronic unemployment.  Some of you reading this may be suffering from depression, addiction, some form of dementia, schizophrenia or a mood disorder - or may know someone who is.  Prison, or treatment and rehabilitation?

Those words haunt me, “She needed help, not prison.”

Bill Barksdale was a 2016 inductee into the Realtor® Hall of Fame.  He is a referral agent for Coldwell Banker Mendo Realty Inc.  707-489-2232.  CADRE# 01106662.  Read more of his articles at his blog at BBarksdale.com