A comprehensive jail diversion program designed to treat those with mental illness and substance abuse problems rather than incarcerate them would save East Baton Rouge taxpayers an estimated $3 million in its first year and nearly $55 million over 10 years. That’s according to a new economic analysis commissioned by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, which is spearheading an effort to decriminalize mental illness in the community.
“While many would argue that providing services to meet the needs of those with mental illness is the right thing to do, we also know it’s a cost effective thing to do,” says the Rev. Raymond Jetson, who is working with BRAF and other community leaders on the project.
The estimated savings, unveiled at a news conference earlier this afternoon at BRAF’s offices, are based on the savings experienced in San Antonio, which has one of the most effective diversion programs in the country. Economist M. Ray Perryman, president of the Waco, Texas-based Perryman Group, says Baton Rouge would experience both direct and indirect savings by providing the mentally ill with the treatment they need.
“We adjusted for population, your incidence level, bed space in jail, everything we could find and tried to determine what does it mean for this area if you replicated San Antonio and did almost as well as they did,” Perryman says. “Looking at it that way, the net savings in year one is around $3 million, and at maturity it grows to around $8 million a year.”
Perryman declined to put an estimated price tag on the program, which would include some sort of mental health assessment and treatment facility. Earlier this year, however, Mayor Kip Holden proposed a $335 million bond issue that would have funded, among other things, a $16.5 million mental health assessment center.
Perryman says such facilities usually cost between $15 million and $20 million to build. But building a new facility is not necessarily a requirement to get a program up and running in Baton Rouge, Jetson says.
“It would be a mistake to operate under the assumption that we have to build a building,” he says. “There are a myriad of existing facilities that could more than adequately serve as a facility.”
He declined to provide specific site possibilities.
Addressing the needs of those with mental illness in the community has become a growing problem since the Earl K. Long Medical Center closed in 2013. The hospital provided a mental health emergency room that treated several thousand patients a year. Now, many of those patients end up in prison when they commit minor offenses instead of receiving treatment programs.
Earlier this month, a BRAF committee proposed a continuum of services and a treatment center for East Baton Rouge Parish that uses San Antonio’s model as its reference. The proposal recommends a recovery and empowerment center with triage and assessment services, a sobering unit, detox center, peer-run respite center, case manager and a medical stabilization unit. It is unclear how much operating such a system would cost.
Now that BRAF has made the economic case for such a program, Jetson says the group will begin working on a timeline, identifying possible sources of local, state and federal funding for various aspects of the program and engaging the public in more conversations.
—Stephanie Riegel
