By Rubén Rosario, St Paul Pioneer Press

I spent a few drama-filled hours in jail last week. A sobbing, suicidal inmate named “Christine” barricaded herself in her cell and refused to come out. Another inmate named “Mandy” did likewise in another cell on the same floor; she requested medical care as she showered jail officers with the kind of crude and sexually tinged language that would make even a street pimp blush. And four floors below in the basement, where the old-but-still-functioning jail operates under the arguably more stately and civil Minneapolis City Hall, a clearly agitated inmate named “Michael” held a physician hostage in a locked room.

“I’m not going to hurt him. I just need new medication,” the hostage taker bellowed to a sweaty-palmed-but-composed jail negotiator on the other side of the locked door. Luckily, this was all theater. The inmates were local professional actors taking part in the role-playing portion of a four-day crisis-intervention team (CIT) training session put on by the Barbara Schneider Foundation. The Twin Cities-based nonprofit is named after a mentally ill woman fatally shot by Minneapolis police during a standoff in her apartment in June 2000. But the best art, in my view, imitates raw reality. In recent decades, America’s jails and prisons have become the largest psychiatric hospitals and the repositories of last resort for mentally ill offenders. Mental illness is a brain disorder and not a crime, but we have chosen, largely because of ignorance and short-term convenience, to arrest and incarcerate this social problem.

According to studies and national statistics, about one of every four inmates in U.S. jails and prisons suffers from a mental illness. The breakdown is roughly the same with Minnesota’s jail and prison populations. Corrections officials struggle to deal with mentally ill inmates amid escalating medical costs and dwindling budgets. Meanwhile, on the streets and inside homes, too many confrontations end up like Schneider’s.

In 1998, just two years earlier, Americans with severe mental disorders were shot and killed by police at a rate nearly four times as great as that of the general population. The fear of harm, from a public-safety and officer-safety point of view, may have been justified: That same year, mentally ill Americans killed law enforcement officers at a rate 5.5 times higher than the general population did. National crisis? No doubt. But what to do?

CHANGING TACTICS

The response in places like Minnesota has been: Raise awareness. Change the mind-set. Cut through the entrenched cultural stigma about the mentally ill without sacrificing officer safety. Embrace de-escalation techniques while toning down the traditional law-and-order use-of-force continuum with this population. Is it working?

Hennepin County Sheriff’s Lt. Randy Carroll, an 18-year veteran and training-session coordinator, says use-of-force incidents — in which officers physically subdue or restrain inmates — have plunged 40 percent in the county jail in the two years since the training was introduced. The jail books nearly 43,000 people annually, by far the most in the state.

About 70 percent of those inmates are repeat offenders, and a “good percentage of them are mentally ill to some degree,” said Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, the former Minneapolis cop and state legislator who was elected sheriff two years ago.

“We can either serve as just a warehouse or try to do something far more innovative that addresses the root cause of the problem,” said Stanek, adding that the jail has added facilities to house and care for such inmates. “This is absolutely all about de-escalation,” Stanek said. “We are in a place where, to the inmate, there really is no place to run to or go. So there really shouldn’t be a reason, other than an officer-safety or hostage crisis, where we need to use force to solve an issue.”

SPREADING THE WORD

The participants in last week’s training included jail officers from metro and outstate counties. Dave Isais, a Sherburne County jail captain and nearly nine-year veteran, was thrown into the unfolding hostage simulation.

“I’m sure the doctor is pretty scared right now,” Isais told inmate “Michael.” “I know you didn’t mean to do anything,” he added. “Could you let him come over here so we can talk about medication that could help you? Would you be willing to come with me to another room?”

Isais, who shook hands with me and apologized because his was moist from the role-playing encounter, got high marks from Josh Fulwider, a CIT-trained Hennepin County deputy. “The thing I want to stress to you is that in this type of action, there are no limits to what you can say,” Fulwider told him during a break.

“You can say whatever,” Fulwider added. “If it’s something that’s from the training that you received or something you saw in the news, you can use it. Use it to let them understand that you are paying attention and that you care about people.”

In an earlier scenario, Mark Anderson, executive director of the Barbara Schneider Foundation, underscored the hesitancy and fear that jail personnel have about bringing up the issue of mental illness during such incidents. “You are not the first person that has ever asked them this,” Anderson counseled one group. “They are used to talking about it.”

Moments earlier, before Isais was thrust into the mock hostage crisis, a veteran Washington County correctional officer gently tried to coax inmate “Christine” out of a barricaded holding cell. It could have easily been done with force. Roosevelt Collins instead applied verbal judo dripping with empathy and concern.

“You went from ‘(Expletive) you’ to ‘My name is Christine’ to getting her to open up and reveal stuff to you,” said Chris Mays, a CIT-trained Hennepin County deputy monitoring the role-playing segment. “I think you did a really good job. If you had another 20 minutes, I think you would have gotten her.”

“I learned a lot,” Collins told me and others during a break. So did I.

Rubén Rosario can be reached at rrosario@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5454.