Northern Nevada’s largest mental health treatment facility is the Washoe County Detention Facility — jail.
Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said last week cuts made by the Nevada Legislature will exacerbate the Reno area’s mental health crisis.
“It’s going to limit our ability on the outside for how people access mental health,” he said. “We’ve heard about the opioid crisis now for several years. I will tell you the mental health crisis we are in right now is greater than even the opioid [crisis].
Ten percent of all inmates at the facility, Balaam added, suffer from a serious mental health illness. The facility averages about 1,100 inmates.
“Those are the ones who are most unstable, [the] most unpredictable,” he explained.
But 70 to 80% of all inmates suffer from mental health issues. Once incarcerated, though, mental health treatment begins almost immediately.
“Over the last year, what we’ve done with this unit is because of the focus on mental health. We work with the inmates. We work with the courts. We work with the service providers in our community, and we provide them a plan…so that when they go to court, no matter what charges, those individuals now have a plan,” Balaam said.
The detention facility was the subject of a news investigation by the Reno Gazette Journal in 2017 that documented a number of deaths at the jail, from suicides to deaths caused by deputies “violently restraining inmates.”
The RGJ’s reporting found that “only 10 inmates died between 2007 and 2014 — all but two of the deaths were from natural causes. In the two years since [then-Sheriff Chuck] Allen took office, 13 inmates have died in custody.”
Allen said at the time each death was investigated, and some deputies faced discipline, including being fired.
“In 2015 and 2016 the Washoe County Detention Facility was faced with a spike of in-custody deaths,” he said. “Each of these resulted in a thorough and thoughtful investigation to help us better understand and mitigate critical community-wide issues that permeate our facility. These investigations helped lead to changes and pursuits aimed at prevention.”
The RGJ found that staff cuts from the recession contributed to the deaths, as well as problems with training and issues with the facility’s health care provider.
A tour of the detention center today shows that mental health treatment is embedded throughout the facility, starting with being admitted into the jail. More extreme cases of illness require some inmates being separated from others. The jail had three inmates commit suicide last year.
Balaam said each deputy gets crisis intervention training, but he said his greatest fear is how people in crisis will access mental health services. He predicted that with reduced resources the most readily available option is take people to jail and try to work them through the system.
The special session of the legislature had a provision to cut funds from the Mobile Outreach Safety Team, a unit funded in 2009 to assist law enforcement with mental health issues and crisis intervention. The 2017 session of the legislature added resources to the MOST program, allowing MOST to be available seven days a week.
The state was able to substitute general funds with federal CARES Act funding during the 2020 special session
“The general funds were replaced with federal CARES funding as outlined in AB3, specifically,” said Richard Whitley with the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services. “Therefore, [there was] no net decrease to the MOST program.”
