Jennifer Parish warns discharge planning noncompliance persists
Jennifer Parish of the Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project says the city remains out of compliance with longstanding court-ordered discharge planning requirements. She says monitors found quality discharge planning in only slightly over half of cases and connects this to community service gaps.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jennifer Parrish.
I'm the Director of Criminal Justice Advocacy at the Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project.
Thank you for convening this hearing on mental health, and thank you, Council, for asking questions specifically related to discharge planning services, because that's a really important component of connecting people who are inside who are receiving mental health treatment with services on the outside.
One thing we didn't hear.
about in this hearing is the non-compliance that still goes on despite the fact that there's been a court
ordered settlement in place for more than 20 years the city is still not complying with really important components of that specifically related to the quality of discharge planning services that are provided
in the latest monitors report they detail the findings specifically related to services that are for people with serious mental illness like applying for public assistance getting connected with supportive housing and also the quality of those services
in only about
slightly over half of the cases that the monitors looked at did people get overall quality discharge planning services and I want to connect this with what
Nadia Chait said from cases the reason the person they described a perfect example of what happens when someone doesn't get or the kind of situation a person can wind up in if they don't get mental health if they don't get discharge planning services
and why was this person ultimately
caught was because we had cases there who was connected and tried to fill all of the holes in discharge planning that happened.
And that connects really to what Zachary Katz Nelson said, is we can't just look at what's going on inside of the jails.
We have to connect it to what's happening in the community.
If we don't have enough assertive community treatment teams, if we don't have enough supportive housing, if we don't have providers that can connect with discharge planning, it doesn't matter how much we improve that.
we're not really going to be able to serve people in the way that they should.
So thank you for looking at the quality of mental health care.
There's lots that needs to be done to improve that, but we also need to fund the connections that happen outside.
Thank you.