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Montana Tribes Want to Stop Jailing People for Suicide Attempts but Lack a Safer Alternative
Kaiser Health News
POPLAR, Montana — When Maria Vega was a senior in high school in 2015, she found the body of one of her closest friends, who had died by suicide. A few days later, devastated by the loss, Vega tried to take her own life. After the attempt failed, she was arrested and taken to juvenile detention in Poplar, a remote town on the Missouri River a short drive from the North Dakota oil fields. She was put in a cell and kept under observation for several days until a mental health specialist was available to see her. Her only interaction was with the woman who brought food to her cell.“I remember asking her if I could have a hug and she told me, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that,’” Vega recalled. “That was honestly one of the hardest things I ever went through in my life. I felt like I was being punished for being sad.”Jailing people because of a mental health issue is illegal in Montana and every other state except New Hampshire. But Vega is a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, a sovereign nation with its own laws. An 11-year-old tribal policy allows law enforcement to put members who threaten or attempt suicide in jail or juvenile detention to prevent another attempt.Fort Peck’s tribal leaders say they approved the policy out of necessity because there were no mental health facilities equipped for short-term housing of people in mental crisis.The covid pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis. In 2020, the tribes filed a record 62 aggravated disorderly conduct charges, the criminal charge they created in 2010 to allow law enforcement to book people they deemed a risk to themselves or others.
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Lisa Dailey, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that pushes for access to mental health treatment, said jailing people for attempting suicide criminalizes mental illness. “Prison or jail are the worst settings you can possibly be because you’re in a psychiatric crisis,” she said. Even if the care is good, she said, “being incarcerated is a traumatizing experience.”Studies have shown that the risk of self-harm in prison increases if someone has been held in solitary confinement or has previously attempted suicide.The Fort Peck reservation isn’t the only jurisdiction where people can be jailed after a suicide attempt. In New Hampshire, suicidal people often end up in the state’s only secure facility: the men’s prison.After the Fort Peck tribes approached Carpenter’s Native American politics class last year for ideas, he and his undergraduate students began consulting with tribal members and others in Montana and working to research potential alternatives to jail.The Flathead tribe in western Montana, for instance, specifies that people should be held in the “least restrictive environment” possible to protect their well-being, short of a jail cell. Carpenter said this could take the form of a “safe house” that separates a person from weapons.People living with severe mental illness are at a high risk of illness or death due to #COVID19. Our new survey shows that targeted outreach in community settings like @Clubhouse_Intl led to higher vaccination rates and increased safety for people w/ #SMI. https://t.co/hgjLn3fzLT pic.twitter.com/wPDg4QYdzF
— Treatment Advocacy Center (@taccommunicate) September 15, 2021
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The story originally appeared on Kaiser Health News (KHN), a national health policy news service. KHN is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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