Mississippi Remains an Outlier in Jailing People With Serious Mental Illness Without Charges

Biggers concluded that the “medical care customarily provided by the county for mentally ill detainees does not fall below constitutional standards” and that what happened with Boston represented a “scheduling error” and an “isolated instance.” The county, which argued it had provided adequate care for Boston, had the right to detain people like her “in the interest of societal safety,” he found, and those people were not entitled to placement in the “least restrictive alternative” such as a hospital. Biggers considered the Alabama appeals court ruling from a few years earlier, but concluded it didn’t apply because it was based on specific facts about that state’s jails.

“The court declines to hold that use of jails for temporary detention of persons awaiting civil commitment proceedings is unconstitutional per se,” Biggers ruled.

Since then, at least nine lawsuits have been filed over the deaths of Mississippians incarcerated during civil commitment proceedings. None of those lawsuits directly challenged the constitutionality of being jailed during the commitment process. The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the matter, academics and attorneys with expertise in civil commitment said.

In the years after Boston’s death, Mississippi continued to stand out.

In 1992, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Public Citizen’s Health Research Group conducted a national survey about the practice of jailing mentally ill people.

Almost a third of city and county jails in Mississippi responded. About 76% of respondents said they detained people who had not been charged with a crime and were awaiting an evaluation, treatment or hospitalization for mental illness. That was the second-highest percentage of any state in the country and far higher than the national average of 29%.

An unnamed Mississippi jail official said in the organizations’ report that jails were a “dumping ground for what nobody else wants.”

The report gave its “Worst State Award” to Kentucky, where 81% of responding jails reported holding people without criminal charges for mental evaluations.

Two years later, Kentucky’s legislature voted unanimously to ban the practice. The state health agency and its federally designated disability rights organization told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that Kentucky jails today are not used to hold people without charges awaiting mental health evaluations.

Few States Compare to Mississippi

Officials with the Mississippi Department of Mental Health emphasize that they do not support the practice of jailing people during the commitment process. But a spokesperson said they “have heard anecdotally from other states regarding challenges of individuals waiting in jail.”

Nationally, even basic data like the number of people committed each year is elusive. After reviewing some of Mississippi Today and ProPublica’s findings, the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that advocates making it easier for people with mental illness to get treatment, started planning a project to understand how often people are jailed without charges during the commitment process across the U.S.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica contacted agencies overseeing mental health and disability advocacy organizations in every state to find out whether Mississippi is an outlier. It is.

Respondents in 42 states and the District of Columbia said they were not aware of people being regularly held in jail without charges during the psychiatric civil commitment process. In a handful of those states, respondents said they had seen it once or twice over the years.

In two states, people can be sent from state psychiatric hospitals to mental health units inside prisons. In a few others, respondents said they had seen people jailed for noncompliance with court-ordered treatment for mental illness or substance abuse.

Respondents in three other states — Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming — reported that people sometimes are sent to jail to await psychiatric evaluations, but the information they provided suggested that it happens to fewer people, and for a shorter period, than in Mississippi.

In 2018, staffing shortages at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute caused people to be held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex until they could be evaluated. The next year, an Anchorage judge ordered an end to the practice except in the “rarest circumstances,” finding that it had caused “irreparable harm.”

A subsequent settlement declared that jails shouldn’t be used unless no other option was available and that such detentions should be as short as possible.

But detentions do still occasionally happen in the state when people in rural areas await transportation to an evaluation center, said Mark Regan, legal director at the Disability Law Center of Alaska. According to the Alaska Department of Family and Community Services, people awaiting evaluation were held in jail 555 times from mid-2018 through late February 2023.

Across South Dakota, people without charges sometimes have been held in jail during the commitment process, according to law enforcement agencies and Disability Rights South Dakota, but such holds are limited by law to 24 hours; in Mississippi, the vast majority of cases analyzed were for more than 24 hours. The South Dakota Department of Social Services said it doesn’t track how often it happens and declined to answer questions.

And in Wyoming, a person can be held in jail for up to 72 hours on an emergency basis before a hearing, but they must have a mental examination within 24 hours. Such holds in jail have occurred “in very rare circumstances,” according to the state.

Attempts to constrain the use of jails date back at least to 1950, when the federal government sent governors model legislation that limited the incarceration of people for mental illness to “extreme emergency” situations. The National Institute of Mental Health called incarcerating such people “among the worst of current practices.”

Some states adopted the legislation. Mississippi did not.