June 3, 2006
Austin American-Statesman
Commentary
By Joe Crews

Travis County will soon do what no other county in the nation has done: create a stand-alone public defender office dedicated solely to representing criminal defendants with mental illness.

This is a bold and pioneering step and one that needs to be replicated across Texas, where jails house more than five times as many people with mental illness as do our psychiatric hospitals.

Credit is due to Travis County's leadership for its vision and dedication, to the Travis County mental health community for its work to support the county's effort, and to the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense that so generously awarded Travis County a $500,000 grant to make the Mental Health Public Defender Office a reality.

This is not the first step the county has taken to improve legal representation to indigent defendants with mental illness. Last year, Travis County established a Mental Health Wheel, which now consists of 10 lawyers trained to work with defendants with serious mental illness. Although the lawyers work tirelessly on behalf of their clients, they lack the time and resources to connect many of their clients with community-based programs that can get and keep them out of jail.

With the opening of the MHPD Office in coming months, Travis County will provide a critical "missing piece" in the justice system. In addition to providing two lawyers to help handle part of the Mental Health Wheel's large misdemeanor caseload, the MHPD Office will hire two social workers and two caseworkers to help identify community-based alternatives to more expensive jail time that could potentially keep these defendants from recycling through the justice system.

This kind of support could help reduce the lengthier jail stays experienced by defendants with serious mental illness. For example, a snapshot of the Travis County Jail population on Aug. 22, 2005, found that, compared to the general population accused of misdemeanor offenses, men with mental health needs had been jailed more than twice as long, 51 days, and women almost three times as long, 32 days.

Even more important, the MPHD Office will provide an institutional voice for defendants with mental illness — bringing together state and local stakeholders to find and develop long-term, cost-effective, community-based options to jailing persons with mental illness.

As Travis County works to establish the office, we encourage the leadership to make this voice a strong one by selecting someone to head the MHPD who is as dynamic and as innovative as the county has been in securing funding for the office.

This is a ground-breaking development, and Travis County and the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense have raised the bar for counties looking to provide high-quality legal representation for these special needs defendants.

Their vision puts the spotlight where it belongs, on treating, rather than criminalizing, mental illness.