She had seen her son in jail before. More times than she can remember, in fact, with arrests dating back to the 1990s. But she had always gone to a designated visiting area.
This time, Marilyn Welton was taking a rare private tour of the Tulsa Jail’s new mental health pod when she saw her 48-year-old son locked inside a cell, with bare white walls, a stainless steel toilet and a slab for a bed.
“It’s different,” Welton said. “Even after all these years, I wasn’t prepared for how lonely he looked.”
Arrested after leading police on a high-speed chase through west Tulsa in July 2016, when family members say he was suffering from paranoid delusions, Jeff Welton has been incarcerated for most of the last 18 months while waiting for the courts to decide whether he’s mentally competent to stand trial. His mental condition, however, seems to have deteriorated further while he has been in the county jail’s new mental health pod, his mother said.
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Sometimes, for example, he believes that his parents are imposters. And in one instance, Jeff used his clothes to clean his jail cell before putting the clothes back on, sitting for hours in his own filth, Marilyn said.
“If they can’t deal with psyche-patient issues in jail, they should not put them in jail,” she said bitterly. “That’s basically the crux of the problem.”
Jail officials seem to agree, at least to some extent. The Tulsa Jail, however, doesn’t get to choose its inmates. Administrator David Park has to take whoever law enforcement officers bring in.
Oklahoma followed a nationwide trend by shutting down most state-run mental hospitals in the 1960s and ‘70s, Park explained.
“We’re paying a pretty big dividend now for that decision,” he said. “Those people didn’t just go away. Now we’re treating them in jails and in prisons.”
Tulsa County’s mental health pod is a multimillion-dollar attempt to “make the best of it,” Park said.
The pod opened last April after voters approved a 15-year extension of a 0.026 percent sales tax increase to fund a $15 million expansion of the jail, part of which is dedicated entirely to housing inmates with diagnosed mental illnesses. The area houses 106 inmates in four levels of security, ranging from 24-hour suicide watch to a dormitory-style wing with relatively free access to televisions and a recreation yard.
It stays consistently full, Park said, but accounts for only a small fraction of the total jail population. Statewide, however, more than half of the prison population has a history of mental illness, according to DOC records.
Since the vast majority of prisoners pass through county jails before going into the custody of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, Tulsa County’s mental health pod clearly isn’t big enough to hold every inmate with mental health issues — only the worst cases.
“Is it big enough? Probably not,” Park said. “I would say ‘build it and they will come.’ If we could add capacity tomorrow, it would fill up. But you have to manage the resources that you have, and I would say we’re doing that pretty well.”
The pod has a psychiatrist and psychologist on staff, along with clinicians who can dispense medications.
“But we’re not a mental health hospital,” Park said. “We’re a jail. We’re doing our best to give people the treatment they need, but we’re still a jail, and we can’t change that.”
The pod was designed differently from the older parts of the jail to allow more sunlight and give detention officers a better view into the cells, allowing them to monitor inmates’ behavior.
If mental health patients have to be incarcerated, it’s better to have the kind of specially trained staff that the pod offers, said David Van Risseghem, the Public Policy Committee chair for the Tulsa chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI.
“But they shouldn’t be in jail,” said Van Risseghem, who volunteers to provide crisis intervention training to detention officers, a requirement to work in the mental health pod.
Jails, by definition, focus on punishment and deterrence, not making patients better, Van Risseghem said. The Tulsa Jail, for example, limits who can visit an inmate and how often, with the mental health pod abiding by the same visitation policies as the rest of the jail.
“But we believe that friends and family are essential to healing,” Van Risseghem said. “Especially when you are taken to an unfamiliar setting like the jail, a familiar face can be therapeutic.”
That’s why NAMI is encouraging the jail to relax visitation rules for the pod. Jail officials point out that visitors can already use a video visitation system in the jail lobby, with no appointment or background check necessary. But mental health patients may not understand how to use the system, Van Risseghem said.
He also hopes the jail will offer discounted prices in the commissary because mental health patients are even more likely than the rest of the jail population to have limited financial resources, and they may not comprehend what items they need to buy and what items the jail will provide for free.
“The root of the problem, however, is that we’re criminalizing mental illness,” Van Risseghem said. “We’re punishing people instead of helping them.”
Jeff Welton was released from jail this week on a recognizance bond and admitted to the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health. A competency hearing is scheduled for next week.
