Ryan Aquata (Freedom Agenda) on treatment program gaps for people with serious mental illness

Good afternoon.

My name is Ryan Aquata.

I work with Freedom Agenda, a member-led project at the Urban Justice Center.

Prior to my work at Freedom Agenda, I spent several years working in the Bronx Criminal Court for an alternative to incarceration program at the Fortune Society, working with anyone that the district attorney in court would allow me to.

We helped people find housing and jobs, get their GEDs, reunite with their families, get connected to treatment, and so much more.

Our program regularly did amazing things for the people in the community.

But to be completely honest, the courts frequently did not allow me to work with most of the people that I interviewed who were detained on Rikers Island.

Sometimes the DA would refuse to consider an alternative solely based on the nature of the charge, despite the evidence that ATIs are much more effective at preventing future arrests than time at Rikers.

And given that our city budget funds the DAs, the city should be doing more to ensure that they're not creating unnecessary obstacles to diversion.

But honestly, most often the obstacle was that I couldn't piece together an adequate treatment plan for someone with serious behavioral health needs.

I'd make referral after referral to programs across the five boroughs and beyond, but if someone had a dual diagnosis or a serious mental illness that wasn't currently being medicated or any kind of history of violence, each program would reject the application.

In turn, they'd tell me that the person needed a higher level of care, a level of care that no facility seemed to offer.

So people with serious mental illness are being failed by the jails and by the court system, often even when a judge and DA are willing to release someone.

someone to a treatment program.

Because so many of our programs are at capacity, the wait lists are too long, people languish on Rikers and sink deeper into crisis, which harms everyone there and ultimately drags cases out for years.

So the city needs to ensure that we're adequately funding the programs that get people off Rikers at scale.

That means funding enough mobile treatment teams to eliminate the long wait lists for those services, funding enough crisis respite centers to comply with local law 118 of 2023.

It means helping Harbor House, the only residential treatment program in the five boroughs who will work with the people no one else will, get the $3 million in capital funding they need to renovate a building and bring online 60 more beds.

It means funding an outpatient competency restoration pilot so that New York City can catch up with the dozens of other states and municipalities that are already doing it.

And it means funding Mach J's ATI programs and reentry services at a scale where they can both grow what's working well and also pilot new programs and initiatives that will better serve the people that existing programs don't.

And I've linked to that all of those budget demands in my written testimony and outlined several other things the council can do to address this issue.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you to the panel.

And you'll send us the written testimony, right?

Okay.

Thank you.

We'll call it the next panel.

Yona Zeitz, Michelle Evans, Michael Tucker, Blake Walker.

I'm going to give another call for Chaplain Phillips.

You can begin in any order.

Just take your mic off of mute.

Turn on your mic.

Yep, there you go.