News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office will apply for a grant to help cover the cost of transporting mental patients from medical hospitals to mental hospitals.
Sheriff Eddie Farris said it is the responsibility of all Sheriffs in the state to be in charge of these transportations. He said that they have become more taxing because the state has decreased the number of mental hospitals over the past two governor’s terms.
“We as Sheriffs don’t think it’s fair that somebody who is needing some mental health help, we show up and we have to cuff them in order to follow protocols and procedures and put them in the back of a patrol car when they really haven’t done anything wrong,” Farris said. “But we can’t really get any help from our state agencies to help us on that.”
Farris said these mental health patients come to their attention either by families who call and ask for aid or by hospitals who designate patients that need further help from a mental health institution.
Putnam County ran some 500 trips last year. He said the grant will be used to hire an approved third-party transportation service with the projected grant amount of at least $100,000. Farris said that using this kind of service will allow the office to use personnel more efficiently.
Farris said that at any given time, probably 25 percent of inmates in jails belong in a mental health institution rather than a jail environment but that there are very few places to take them. He said that more often than not there are no beds available or they have never been given any help.
“So they do things to be charged criminally and they end up in our criminal justice system and end up in jail, but truthfully they need to be in mental health hospitals,” Farris said. “We have sort of dropped the ball on that in the state of Tennessee with that particular issue and we’re trying to work through it with mental health experts, but that is kind of what that grant is about to help us with that.”
