James Tatsch was not charged with any crime. But when he was found unresponsive in an isolation cell at the Alcorn County Jail on Jan. 17, he had been locked up for 12 days. He died at the local hospital.
Tatsch was waiting for mental health treatment through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Every year, hundreds of people going through the process are detained in county jails for days or weeks at a time while they wait for evaluations, hearings and treatment. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and receive little or no mental health care while jailed.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during this process. Tatsch, who was 48 years old, is at least the 15th. No one in the state keeps track of how often people die while jailed for this reason. The news organizations identified the deaths through lawsuits, news clips and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports. MBI investigates in-custody deaths only at the request of the local sheriff or district attorney.
Heh, drunken rebuttals are so much better when they’re acknowledged as one. It really takes the edge off.
Alright, for one, I am not in the US or a US citizen, so a lot of my shock comes from there. For what it’s worth, I have not engaged with these processes in the US at all and here not professionally, but I did learn them because of life reasons. And like I said last time, it is messed up here too, in that some of the reasonable terms and limits to restricting someone’s autonomy and free movement do get suspended in a very weird grey area when precautionary measures, including for medical reasons, are established. Full judicial review can take years here, too, and cautionary measures can stand in place for that whole period. Just to ground the conversation a little.
However, over here before you get detained indefinitely for any reason, and yes, being suicidal counts, you still need that to get cleared by a judge. You can’t just hold a person for two weeks on the mere suspicion that they may harm themselves and not have a doctor or a court make a decision on whether there is reason for that. So already I am way out of my comfort zone in terms of constitutional guarantees at play here. Once you find somebody dead while that process is happening we’re in “maybe we need this to change right away” territory. When that happens a dozen times you mostly just set it all on fire and start over.
Now, on the specifics, I do have some questions for you, if you’re drunk enough to still pay attention to this thread.
One is that I’m a bit confused about the dfiference between being held pending evaluation and having a checklist of evaluatory criteria. Because it seems to me that if the actual evaluation is taking so long to happen that people are dying in the process then the checklist is the de facto evaluation. What’s the difference between that and letting the cops make the call? Which yeah, terrible idea, but… you know, if you just get there anyway through a loophole that seems like a problem.
For the record on the next thing, when I mean “whoever runs the institution” I mean whoever owns it, not the staff. I have no idea if this is all handled in public institutions (which is what I would expect here) or in private facilities (which is what I’d expect in the US, but maybe that’s my socialdemocracy bias). While we’re on this, I do take issue with the “don’t sue because the system is already underfunded” point. Those are two separate concerns, and if the impact is on the underfunded medical system then that’s a third problem. Asking victims (and this guy is dead, so… yeah, that’s the right word) to not seek compensation because the negligence is the result of more negligence in underfunding the system is not it. Of course these are all entirely hypothetical lawsuits, so who cares, but still.
Honestly, if you ask me what I’d do in that scenario… well, I’d get involved in the politics of it, which is what I’ve done in life when I bumped with that sort of stuff. I mean, the way I’m hearing it the main problem is funding and staffing. The way I see it, this is the still literally richest country on Earth. So yeah, the reaction must start with voting for anybody who will fix that by any amount and continue along a line that ends with locked down airports and food courts, like the French are doing today. Or at least with thousands of marches, like the Germans did a few weeks ago. I get it, half the US thinks that public services are evil (somehow), but holy shit, man, the camel’s back has to snap at some point.
Right?
Anyway, as a PS, you weren’t that hostile. For online forum rants that was maybe a 3/10. I’ve had way worse on accout of far less. If that makes you feel better, you’re a mellow drunken poster.