MONTGOMERY COUNTY JAIL REGULARS
Most often booked since 2000
Clayton James Peck, 59
Booked since 2000: 237 times on 601 charges
Most frequent charge: More than 440 panhandling charges
Time spent: 33,118 hours or 1,380 days *
Jail cost, not including medications: $78,227
Most days spent in jail
William Michael Haygood, 72
Booked since 2000: 86 times on 207 charges
Most frequent charge: 112 theft charges
Time spent: 60,776 hours or 2,534 days
Jail cost: $143,558
Most often booked in 2014
Tallulah Tanner Jones (AKA Tallulah Tanner, AKA Tallulah Jones)
Booked in 2014: 31 times on 68 charges
Most frequent charge: 60 aggravated assault charges
Time spent in 2014: 1,470 hours or 61.3 days
Jail cost in 2014: $3,798
Source: Dayton Daily News analysis of Montgomery County Jail booking data
Note: Cost is simply the basic jail housing cost of $56.69 per inmate day multiplied by the days as calculated above. This is a conservative estimate that does not include psychiatric medications or other expenses such as transportation to a psychiatric hospital.
* Days are computed from hours served divided by 24. A booking at 11 p.m. with release the next morning does not count as two days.
Digging deep
The Dayton Daily News analyzed a database of 490,000 bookings at Montgomery County Jail since the beginning of 2000 to determine who has been booked most often, on what charges and who spent the most time behind bars. It also gathered other data from the county sheriff’s department mental health screenings and medical costs, and talked to mental-health experts to bring you this story.
Who has spent the most time in the Montgomery County Jail since 2000, and how much have they cost taxpayers while doing it? Our digital-only page on MyDaytonDailyNews.com has the data.
Nearly one out of every six inmates booked into the Montgomery County Jail had a mental health problem last year, and as more people fall through social service cracks across the state and nation, the cost to taxpayers is increasing.
Millions of dollars, experts say, are being thrown at a never-ending cycle that sees the same mentally ill and drug-abusing people coming and going through a system that is not designed to handle them.
“This isn’t just a local issue — our jails have become the large mental health facilities across the country by default,” said Helen Jones-Kelley, executive director of Montgomery County’s Department of Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services.
Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer said jails are designed to hold inmates, “but we’re turning into a substance abuse facility, a rehab facility and a mental health facility.”
“Every sheriff who runs a jail has the same issue,” he said. “It’s not something the jail is accustomed to handling.”
Last Wednesday, for example, Plummer said 123 inmates were going through drug withdrawal. That accounted for more than 15 percent of the 792 jail inmates at the time.
“That’s a five-day, cold-turkey detox,” Plummer said. “It’s a friggin’ mess.”
Most of those people, he said, are also suffering from mental illnesses.
“That’s why they’re using the heroin — they’re self-medicating.”
And the problem is getting worse.
While the number of inmates booked into the county jail has decreased by 10 percent over the past five years, the percent of inmates who have tested positive for mental illness has increased by more than a third, jail data shows.
In 2010, 3,500 inmates tested positive for mental illness issues in screenings given when they were booked into the jail. That was 12.1 percent. Last year, with almost 3,000 fewer bookings, 4,217 or 16.2 percent of inmates screened positive for mental illness.
The increasing numbers of mentally ill, Plummer said, are stressing his staff. Jail employees are not mental health professionals, but they are spending increasing amounts of time dealing with, protecting and sometimes subduing mentally ill inmates.
To make matters worse, those inmates, dubbed “frequent fliers,” keep coming back.
“We get them in the jail. We get them stabilized on medication. We let them out,” Plummer said. “They quit taking their medications. They become unstable. And they’re either stealing, panhandling, threatening people, assaulting people. And the poor police, they have to do something with them, right?”
So they come back to jail. Plummer said he sometimes sees the cycle repeat twice in the same day.
“We need to sit down with a group of people and figure out a solution,” he said, “because we can’t sustain this.”
Cost of ‘frequent fliers’
A Dayton Daily News analysis of a database of jail bookings since 2000 shows that 213 individuals have been booked into the Montgomery County Jail at least 50 times each.
Those 213 inmates alone have together been booked more than 14,000 times and have spent more than 3.8 million hours in the county jail — the equivalent of about 160,000 days. That has cost taxpayers more than $9 million over the 15-year period — not including the cost of psychotropic medications.
Last year, the county jail’s medical staff dispensed an average of 729 psychiatric medications every month — a two-thirds increase from 2013, according to jail data. The total cost of those drugs in 2014 came to $388,534.
The jail spent $3.3 million on all medical costs for inmates last year.
The analysis also found 16 inmates who had been booked more than 100 times each. Through Jan. 5 of this year, those 16 people had been booked a total of 2,221 times, and had spent more than 380,000 hours (about 16,000 days) in the jail. That cost taxpayers about $900,000, not including medications.
Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley, who previously served as Clerk of Courts, has been watching the list of repeat offenders in the jail with concern for some time.
“There are people on this list who just are in that jail over and over and over again because of their mental illness and possibly other addiction,” Foley said. “There’s no doubt that the jail is really a shelter for some of these people who just have real problems, unfortunately.”
Booked 237 times
The most-booked individual since 2000 in the Montgomery County Jail — by far — is Clayton James Peck, according to the analysis.
Peck, 59, has been booked on 237 occasions on 601 charges from 2000 through the first week of 2015. He was booked on Jan. 5 of this year, making it 16 straight years in which he’s spent time in the jail.
Through Jan. 5, Peck had spent 1,406 days in jail, costing taxpayers about $80,000. The most recent estimate of inmate costs from the county Office of Management and Budget estimate that it costs $56.69 a day to house someone in the jail. That does not include medications or medical treatment.
More than three-quarters of the charges against Peck during bookings involve panhandling.
He was arrested again on Jan. 23, again for panhandling, and was still in the jail as of Thursday.
Peck repeatedly gets arrested by Dayton Police for panhandling at the Interstate 75 off-ramp at North Main Street, Plummer said.
“I’ve talked to him once, and he said he has a crack habit,” Plummer said. “And it’s got to be mental. For this cycle to continue back and forth, it has to be mental illness, or a combination of mental and drug abuse.”
When Peck gets out, he’ll just go back to his intersection … and get arrested again, Plummer said.
“We’ve got the same people in all the time and the jail is not the answer,” he said.
The system fails
The closure of Dayton’s Twin Valley public mental health hospital in 2008 helped balance the state budget, but it also created a gap in services that has yet to be fully addressed, law enforcement and health professionals say.
That closing means that when local counties need to send an inmate to a psychiatric hospital equipped to accommodate prisoners, they have to drive them to either Summit Behavioral Healthcare in Cincinnati or the Northwest Ohio Psychiatric Hospital in Toledo. The latter is about a six-hour round trip from the Dayton area.
Plummer said such trips add to the costs of coping with mentally ill inmates.
A jail psychiatrist works 10 hours a week, Plummer said. But he called the jail’s medical staff “overworked.”
“We had a place here in our community that took care of those problems,” he said. “Now that we don’t have that, you see them walking the street.”
The reason people with mental illnesses end up in jail is because they’re not being helped outside jail, said Michelle Maloy-Kidder, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in Montgomery County.
“With the way the budget cuts have happened … there’s nowhere else for them to go,” Maloy Kidder said.
Betsy Johnson, associate executive director of NAMI of Ohio, called the number of mentally ill people navigating the criminal justice system “alarming.” There aren’t enough forensic beds for all of them, she said.
But Eric Wandersleben, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, said the 2008 closing of Twin Valley and another facility in Cambridge resulted in no net loss of beds statewide.
The state’s six consolidated psychiatric hospitals have a total of 1,081 beds, according to Ohio MHAS. As of midnight Feb. 4, 980 of them were filled, leaving 101 beds open, according to the department’s daily hospital census tally.
Wandersleben said the state’s six regional psychiatric hospitals have been near capacity recently, but there is no wait list.
New program launched
In most cases, hospitalization isn’t the answer, Jones-Kelley said. If possible, it’s usually better to treat those with mental health issues in a way that allows them to remain in their homes and communities, she said.
And Gov. John Kasich’s 2014 embrace of new federal Medicaid dollars isn’t the answer, she said, because Medicaid eligibility doesn’t follow anyone into jail or prison.
“It doesn’t pay for anyone who’s locked up,” Jones-Kelly said.
An expansion of Medicaid dollars — or a different funding stream — to follow the mentally ill wherever they happen to be is needed, she said.
A new program launched by her county agency attempts to address at least part of the problem. As part of the jail pre-release program, addicted inmates are stabilized by Samaritan Behavioral Health before they leave the county jail, “to get them on to whatever meds they need before they’re released,” she said.
And the program offers Job and Family Services outreach “the minute they’re released,” Jones-Kelly said.
The program has been in place for three weeks.
Budget proposals
Some help could be coming from Kasich’s new budget proposal, which includes $3 million annually to focus on strategies that reduce transfers, and improve safety and capacity issues in jails and hospitals, Wandersleben said.
The proposal also shifts money to the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services from the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction for prison-based “recovery services,” he said. The total proposal is $27.4 million in fiscal year 2016 and $34.3 million the next fiscal year, Wandersleben said.
The money would be used to hire staff to serve people eligible for recovery services while still in prison and to arrange for community services such as “sober housing” upon a person’s release, Wandersleben said.
Funding services for those who have both an addiction and a mental illness makes sense, Johnson said.
“For the most part, a lot of people who end up in the corrections system have both, so that’s good news,” she said.
Also, the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has beefed up standards for dealing with mentally ill inmates, effective Jan. 1, Johnson said. But the department has only two people to track how closely those standards are being followed in 92 full-service Ohio jails, she said.
Hospitals feel strain
When a police officer encounters someone with mental illness the officer has two choices, Plummer said.
“If (a suspect) commits a crime, he steals from a UDF or something, or he’s threatening somebody, which happens all the time, if it’s criminal they bring him to us,” Plummer said. “If the guy is suicidal, the guy is threatening to hurt himself, they’ll take him to the hospital.”
So, like the county jail, hospital emergency rooms are left to pick up the slack trying to meet local mental health treatment needs, said Bryan Bucklew, president and CEO of the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association (GDAHA).
From 2007 — the year before Twin Valley closed — to 2014, emergency rooms in the GDAHA service area saw a 40 percent increase in mental health-related visits, he said.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Bucklew said. “In real terms, we’re seeing about 41 patients a day in an emergency room in the Dayton region for mental behavior and health.”
Bucklew and Plummer say they warned former Gov. Ted Strickland that closing Twin Valley would strain local resources.
“What we told Gov. Strickland back then was that the emergency room goes against everything we know in terms of making sure people have access to the right care at the right time at the right facility,” Bucklew said. “And the right facility is not an emergency room department for a mental or behavioral health patient.”
But Dayton does have programs to help, said Dayton police detective Patty Tackett, who is trained in crisis intervention to assist the mentally ill. She also trains others.
The region also has the county Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services board and a mental health court within Dayton’s Municipal Court, she said.
“Montgomery County has a lot of resources,” Tackett said. “It’s up to us how we utilize those resources. Can they always be better? Well, yeah … Nothing is perfect.”
Plummer, whose staff has to deal with mentally ill inmates every day, and county commissioner Foley said the system has to work better.
“I think if we all get together and we work on this population of people suffering from mental illnesses and drug abuse, we can really decrease costs to the taxpayers,” Plummer said.
“Obviously we need to be doing more,” Foley said. “And it’s frustrating because people are working really hard, and we would all like to see better results than we’re seeing.
“There are just too many people in that jail who have mental health issues that we wish weren’t there.”
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