CGRC would lower incarceration rates of those with mental and behavioral health problems; improve local access to health services
Pictured: Wasco County Sheriff Lane Magill
A working group of nearly twenty-five stakeholders from Hood River, Wasco and Sherman Counties and other regional organizations have submitted a $50,000 grant proposal to Oregon Health Authority to pay strategic planning costs to add supporting infrastructure and programming services to address mental and behavioral health inequities in the Columbia River Gorge in the form of a Columbia Gorge Resolution Center (CGRC). The CGRC could potentially co-locate with Mid-Columbia Community Action Council’s (MCCAC) Navigation Center in The Dalles, providing a one-stop mental health, behavioral health, addiction, housing, and transition services center. The CRGC and its programming could take over $15-$20 million to build and implement.
The CGRC would take a multi-county regional approach to address mental health needs in Wasco, Hood River, and Sherman County.
Although specific programming and partnerships have yet to be defined and decided upon. The current vision for the CGRC, is that it would be a mental health and addictions treatment facility specializing in providing access to co-occurring (mental health and addictions) treatment, psychiatric and addiction stabilization, and inpatient respite services for the community and the surrounding counties.
The CGRC could house several mental health crisis clinicians, crisis respite beds, co-occurring self-help support groups, counseling, transitional programming focusing on life skills, emotional skills and medication management and ongoing mental health support services for adults and youth. Crisis respite services offered by CGRC would help divert those with mental and behavioral health issues from law enforcement custody into supportive services. Programming could follow a Community Restoration model, which focuses on meeting mental health needs in the community in a non-institutional, community-based setting.
“We hope that this will be the ultimate resource for the communities that we’re serving,” said Wasco County Sheriff Lane Magill.
The idea for the center came from a twenty-five person Local Public Safety Coordinating Council (LPSCC) workgroup facilitated by Wasco County Sheriff Lane Magill, who has been working on projects to address regional mental and behavioral health-related arrests and incarceration issues for over a decade.
“I have a passion for helping people with mental illness and behavioral health issues, I’m not a trained expert, but I do know they take up a tremendous amount of time for law enforcement and in our criminal justice system,” said Magill.
Wasco County Courthouse
Magill said that the Sheriff’s Office had received nearly 50 mental health calls from January 1st to August 30th of 2021 a 10% increase from last year. (The City of The Dalles received over 1,400 mental health-related calls during that same time period) Magill said that approximately 44 percent of NORCOR inmates have ongoing mental or behavioral health issues and that arrest and incarceration often triggered worsened symptoms of mental illness, leading to a rinse-and-repeat cycle of holds, arrests, and incarcerations of youth and adults which only served to further destabilize individuals with mental and behavioral health issues.
“Regional law enforcement has taken people into custody that have committed a low-level crime, maybe disorderly conduct or some little thing like that, and the instant they walk through the threshold at NORCOR it just exacerbates the behavioral health or mental health issue tenfold,” said Magill.
“Why are we doing this?” asked Magill “We are seeing that individuals that have mental health and behavioral health issues are repeatedly coming in and out of the system. And we’re not giving them the care that they deserve, these are individuals in crisis. We can’t just keep locking these people up and kicking them out. It’s not solving the problem.”
Individuals who do receive treatment at NORCOR are then often released from jail with no exit plans for medication management, employment, mental and behavioral health services, housing assistance, or safety plan in place to keep them on the path to success.
“We know what it takes to solve the problem. It’s called programs, and it’s called treatment and it’s called caring for our individual citizens and our communities. We got to wrap our arms around them and take care of these people,” said Magill.
Magill said that a proactive approach to the problem would be to create a center that would deal with detection, prevention, proper treatment, and ongoing support instead of simply locking people away.
“When an individual is identified as being a danger to themselves or others they can be placed on a Police Officer or Director’s hold. The statute allows law enforcement to transport those individuals to an acute care treatment facility,” said Magill “Historically regional law enforcement transported those individuals to Eastern Oregon Psychiatric Center (EOPC) in Pendleton. EOPC was a kind of crisis, respite, semi-long term facility where people could receive treatment in a safe and secure environment.”
Magill said the EOPC facility was later shut down leading to a vacuum in psychiatric care in the state.
“After EOPC closed, our jails became the default mental health facility, and that is not our job. Our job is to protect public safety,” said Magill. “I’m a big believer in community restoration and I’m not a big believer in the institutionalization of the mentally ill. With that being said, certain individuals who live in our communities do pose a public safety risk, and those individuals could potentially be diverted to the resolution center instead of NORCOR.”
Magill said the ultimate goal for him as law enforcement in addressing the root causes of mental health-related arrests and incarcerations was to help divert qualified individuals with mental health issues from the jail system (NORCOR currently only employs one mental health clinician) and into The Columbia Gorge Resolution Center care services, where individuals could receive stabilization and ongoing treatment.
Magill said he found existing stigmas surrounding mental health frustrating and counterproductive to fixing the problem.
“People have to get rid of their ‘not in our backyard’ attitude,” said Magill “I hate to tell you this but it is in our backyard. Within a five-block radius of any home you’ll find a wide range of mental health issues including acute and semi-acute mental health crises, and people struggling with addiction. A study done two years ago found that Wasco and Hood River County are home to approximately 4,000 community members that have been diagnosed with persistent mental illness.”
“What happened to just putting your arms around these people and showing them just a little bit of love?” said Magill. “I’m more than happy to sit with somebody on a street corner and talk for an hour just to make sure they’re going to be okay. There are individuals that I’ve dealt with over the last 15-20 years who are no longer with us because they took their own lives. Am I mad at myself for that? No. But I do wish we had a place they could have gone where they felt safe and could get treatment.”
“We’ve got to come together to fix this problem because it’s here and we’ve got good ways to fix it. We have highly managed systems to make it work and be successful. I mean look at what we’ve done with Bridges to Change in Wasco County, we have the highest success rate of any transitional housing program in the entire state,” said Magill. “We’re good at this.”
Magill said that due to multiple collaborations with local and regional organizations and agencies the Columbia Gorge Resolution Center would positively impact mental and behavioral health care for adults and youth in the region at almost every level.
“For too long mental health has unfortunately taken a backseat to physical health when it comes to public policy and national attention. As we work toward building a healthier community we know that we need to have equal focus on both, especially for our more vulnerable citizens,” said Dennis Knox, LPSCC work group member, President & CEO of Mid-Columbia Medical Center. “MCMC is proud to be part of this important project as it is consistent with our longstanding values of caring for the whole person and providing access to the full spectrum of care so that our local residents are able to live their lives to the fullest.”
“I’m a solutions-minded guy,” said Magill “Is this going to cost money? Absolutely. Is it going to take time? Absolutely. Can we get it done? Absolutely.”
