The Chief and His Ward

Too often, when the mentally ill have no place to go, they go to jail

by TIMOTHY ROCHE

Big Earl is crouching naked inside a cell at the Natchez police department while officers watch from a safe distance. He rises suddenly, all 6 ft. and 275 lbs. of him, hulking now over his captors. His psychotropics have long since worn off because he stopped taking them, and the police want to scoop him up and help him find rest in a bed finally ready for him at the state mental hospital. Instead, Big Earl has jammed his foot in the toilet, flooding the concrete floor. To lure him out, they have offered him 7-Up and $100, but he won't budge. He prefers to negotiate by threatening to throw feces at them.

Behind a surgical mask to filter the odor, police chief Willie Huff tells two officers in latex gloves to use riot shields and ease Big Earl to the floor while the others wrap blankets around him and slide him outside. A tall man, Huff cautiously leads the charge, clutching Earl, hoping not to hurt him and praying not to get sued. He knows mental patients don't belong in small-town jails, but where else can they go? What else can he do?

"If we are civilized, we should not allow this to happen," says Huff, 51, who grew up here, amid the willows, magnolias and antebellum homes. Natchez has always had its collection of eccentrics (an April Fools' Day Parade is in the works), and it has always had its share of the mentally ill. But it used to be that the latter were packed off forever to an institution far away and the police department could go back to its business of caring for just the eccentrics. But since deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960s, when thousands were released from sometimes abusive institutions, they have become Chief Huff's business. When they threaten themselves or somebody else, he holds them until there's a place at Mississippi State Hospital, two hours north in Whitfield, where they typically get treated for 21 days, only to find themselves back in Chief Huff's care. "If somebody goes off their medication and slaps their mama or they run around the yard naked," says Huff, "it's the police who get called to deal with it." And it's the police who will be a main target if the American Civil Liberties Union decides later this year to challenge a 25-year-old state law that allows mental patients to be kept in jail when no other place can be found for them.

Since he became chief seven years ago, five people have either killed somebody or committed suicide while waiting for a bed at Mississippi State Hospital or after they returned home from psychiatric care without follow-up. The town's only private psychiatrist has just retired and can't find a replacement willing to move here. At the town's well-intentioned but underfunded mental-health clinic for indigents, the staff turnover is 100% annually, mostly on account of burnout. One psychologist and two counselors divvy up the 200-plus "consumers" in Adams County. For many, the extent of therapy is little more than a weekly or monthly visit for their pills or shots.

To avoid parking any critically psychotic patients in jail, Gwen Turner, a retired chancery clerk and advocate for the mentally ill, proposed five years ago turning an empty downtown building into a crisis center where Natchez Regional Hospital doctors could volunteer to treat these patients. (The regional hospital won't accept them.) But she found little interest in her proposal.

So Natchez families have continued to lose some of their own to a broken system that makes the desperate wait for a place to go or takes them in only to abandon them again. Roy Dunagan, for one, was desperate enough to show up at the courthouse on June 22, 1998, and sign the commitment papers himself. On the day of his hearing, he packed a vinyl duffel bag with socks, T shirts, the pocket Bible from his childhood and the cross necklace his mother Hilda had given him for Christmas.

Hilda assumed that once the judge ordered him hospitalized, the recovery process could begin. "We thought he'd either be going to Whitfield or to jail first," she says. Instead, she and Roy were told that Whitfield could not take him for two months. On the drive home in his mother's Oldsmobile, hopelessness hung in the air. "What am I supposed to do until then?" he asked her. Seven weeks later, Roy, 24, answered his own question. He stopped by an aunt's house, took a shower, changed into clean clothes and left without goodbyes. "He had already died within himself," says Hilda. He walked to the woods, beyond a railroad track where his cousins ride four-wheelers. He strapped his belt around a low branch, stepped off a plastic bucket and hanged himself. His body was found a week later, on the day his mother received a call that Whitfield was ready for him.

Roy's mother and stepfather say they had begged sheriff's deputies to arrest him and keep him in the county jail but were told that if he was determined to commit suicide, the officers didn't want him doing it in their jail. Unlike Chief Huff, the Adams County sheriff refuses to house mental patients, citing the liabilities involved in turning his cellblocks into psychiatric wards and his guards into nurses.

In the city limits, on the other hand, Chief Huff will find a misdemeanor charge to detain them legally, then drop it when they go to Whitfield. "Willie is doing what the right thing is, regardless of the law," says Jack Lazarus, the chancery judge who decides whether residents should be committed.

When jail is not an option, Lazarus says, he has no choice but to send patients home, sometimes to the "very relatives who have just testified against them." Anthony Smith, now 41, who had been drinking rubbing alcohol and stealing his family's medication, seemed more suicidal than homicidal when his relatives asked Lazarus to commit him in 1997. With no crisis-intervention center nearby, the judge sent him home to wait for a bed at Whitfield. Seventeen days later, Smith got frustrated after handing his grandmother tomato paste instead of the tomato sauce she had asked for. He shot his brother and step-grandfather to death and wounded his grandmother. From jail, he called her daily until she died weeks later, a bullet still lodged near her lung.

Change has been coming to Mississippi's mental-health-care system, but it has been slow. State senator Billy Thames, an influential Democrat, led reform efforts in 1997 after a close relative waited a month for an appointment at her local clinic. "I started making calls, and I could not get any help," he says. "What about the average person who doesn't know anybody?" Thames produced the Mental Health Reform Act of 1997, which, along with subsequent legislation, promised to create seven regional crisis-intervention centers that would keep the mentally ill out of jail, closer to their relatives and not constantly on the road to Whitfield. But these probably won't open for two years. The new laws require communities to take more responsibility for improving their mental-health care, but there's no state budget to do it.

So Chief Huff is still making room for townsfolk like Big Earl in his jail. Back in 1992, Big Earl was driving a car when the voices in his head told him the police were after him again. He rammed into a wall, pinning and killing a man. Last year he walked up to a utility repairman and threatened to kill him for no reason. Each time, Earl has come to the city jail to await an opening at the state mental hospital. Huff knows Earl by now and has compassion for him. He remembers how, when he was six, he watched his own aunt make the trip to Whitfield. Of naked Earl in his jail, Huff says, "He doesn't feel like he's losing his mind, because it's so gradual." After forcing Earl out of the cell, Huff and his men put him in the back of a cruiser. With Earl finally on his way to Whitfield again, Huff drives home and showers. He knows he and Earl will meet again.