Overcrowded State Mental Hospitals Lead to Longer Jail Time and Lack of Treatment
by Michael Thompson
Prospective mental health patients struggle to find beds in psychiatric hospitals across the nation. Most mental health hospitals are short-staffed and turn away patients who battle to find treatment options. The hospitals have too few beds and the ones they have are increasingly consumed by patients placed there under court order. Rather than treating people before the patient’s mental health deteriorates, the hospitals are forced to await criminal charges.
The Marshall Project and KFF Health News investigated the issue in Ohio. Behavioral health experts, lawyers, judges, and more all said essentially the same thing as the worried mother of a prisoner suffering from schizophrenia: it is “easier to criminalize somebody than to get them help.”
The number of available mental health beds in Ohio has plummeted over the past decade from 6,809 to just 3,421. Of the beds that remain, some 90% are assigned to people who are there under court order after serious criminal behavior. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill is pulling $1 trillion from the federal Medicaid budget that helps pay for the beds. Retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton told NPR that the problem is “absolutely” a crisis. She added, “It hurts everybody who has someone who needs to get a hospital bed that’s not in the criminal justice system.”
The challenge to those suffering from mental health issues and their families is stark. But there are broader consequences to the backlog as well. By waiting until there is a serious criminal act to hospitalize someone, it leaves behind victims that could have been avoided and forces police encounters that can have deadly consequences. Landing in jail only delays treatment further.
In Ohio, the wait to get a state bed was 37 days in May 2025. That is “a long time to be waiting in jail for a bed without meaningful access to mental health treatment,” said Shanti Silver at the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center. That same month, 45 patients were awaiting beds at Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare, which serves the Cleveland region. That speaks to serious capacity problems, but some state officials refuse to acknowledge it.
As the Ohio Director of Forensic Services Lisa Gordish told a gathering in Cleveland, “If you build beds—and what we’ve seen in other states is that’s what they’ve done—those beds get filled up, and we continue to have a wait list.” Fortunately, more beds are planned anyway, with a new 200 bed hospital being built in southwestern Ohio. Still, that barely makes a dent in the number of beds lost.
One mental health sufferer whom NPR interviewed spent 100 days in the Montgomery County jail awaiting a bed. Despite the dangers the deadly jail provided him, his mother could not bail him out. She was more worried that he could not survive on his own outside the jail or treatment.
Sources: NPR, The Marshall Project, KFF Health News
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