The police officer turned professor had a question for roughly 150 students gathered Tuesday night in a classroom at Chattanooga State Community College.
“If I’m out here on Tuesday at 10 a.m. and I run into a person having a mental health episode, I can find help for that person,” Marcus Easley began. “But what do I do at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning? What am I supposed to do with the person in a mental health episode?”
Easley, a former Chattanooga Police Department officer for 27 years, waited but nobody answered.
“I didn’t know either,” he said. “You locked them up. It’s what you were trained to do.”
Easley was one of five experts who spoke about the intersection between mental illness and the criminal justice system, and how it often falls on law enforcement and correctional professionals to care for a vulnerable group of people without proper training or resources. Other panelists included death row exonerees, public defenders and prison chaplains.
“We’re talking about the death penalty. We’re talking about prisons. We’re also talking about mental health,” said Jeannie Alexander, who served five years as chaplain for Tennessee’s Death Row inmates. “I’m guessing this room is packed because you know something’s not right.”
Alexander said the three largest mental health providers in America are Cook County prison in Chicago, California State Prison in Los Angeles County and the Riker’s Island jail complex in New York. But at the same time, Alexander said, those systems aren’t serving the needs of people with mental illnesses because corrections officers aren’t properly trained and must dehumanize inmates just to survive the daily trauma that prison creates.
“Tennessee correctional officers are the third lowest paid [in the country],” she said. “Our rate of attrition is over 50 percent. There’s no stablility.”
The goal, she said, is to shift from the mindset of retribution to rehabilitation. Even still, some people suffer at the hands of authorities who would rather close out a case with an arrest and a false confession.
Sabrina Butler Smith, when she was 17, said she tried to save her 9-month-old child when he stopped breathing because of a hereditary condition. But police said she abused and murdered her child and got her to confess after several hours of questioning. In 1990, she was sentenced to death and was later exonerated at the age of 25.
The years afterwards were some of the hardest, Butler said: She couldn’t find work, didn’t know where her child was buried, didn’t know how to trust or adjust to life outside a cage.
Boyd Patterson, a public defender, said Tuesday’s panel was about creating a new narrative about the criminal justice system. He discussed how science-based programs are making a difference.
For instance, Patterson said, brain-scanning technology in the mid-1990s showed why juveniles need their own justice system. And currently, Hamilton County has a Mental Health Court that identifies people in the system who simply need medication and a strong, weekly support system to turn things around.
“The criminal justice [system] is getting a lot right,” Patterson said, “but there’s some things that continually need improvement, too.”
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at zpeterson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757- 6347. Follow him on Twitter @zackpeterson918.