Jail suicide inspires RI judge to start mental health court
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By Barb Ickes | Sunday, January 13, 2008 |
(John Schultz/Quad-City Times) Kayla Hollars, center, holds a picture of her father, Charles Slaughter Jr., who hanged himself at the Rock Island County Jail in 2006. Kim Bowden, left, and Kassandra Walters, right, are Slaughter’s sisters. Buy this Photo
Sometime before the sun came up, Charles Slaughter Jr. wedged a sheet into a smoke detector in his cell at the Rock Island County Jail and slipped the fabric around his neck.
The Colona, Ill., man had been declared unfit to stand trial on theft charges two weeks earlier. The 43-year-old father of two was waiting to be taken to a mental-health hospital where he could be treated for his bipolar disorder and drug abuse.
But he had already spent five unmedicated months behind bars by the time he took the sheet off his bunk on July 16, 2006. The wait was too long.
When Ray Conklin, a judge with less than two years on the bench, read about Slaughter’s jailhouse suicide in the newspaper the next morning, he became sick to his stomach.
“Honestly, I thought I was going to throw up,” he said. “I knew what had happened. I knew we had to do something.”
He also knew it wouldn’t be easy. Even if the county had mental-health support money to burn, how would the judicial system burn it? How would mentally ill inmates be moved through a system that is not equipped for their brand of troubles?
What about the culture that treats the mentally ill? Would they be ready to play ball?
Would the state’s attorney even listen to Conklin’s idea that maybe it was time for Rock Island County to have a separate mental health court?
To the judge’s surprise, people listened.
In fact, everyone seemed to agree: There is struggle enough in being labeled mentally ill. Maybe the label of criminal could be avoided if, for instance, medications could be court-ordered. Conklin had all sorts of ideas for keeping the mentally ill out of his criminal court where, as he saw it, they
didn’t belong.
And now his ideas are coming to life in a tiny courtroom beneath the row of cells where Charles Slaughter Jr. took his own life.
An open book
Three of the most important women in Charles Slaughter’s life — his two sisters and a daughter — use the same words to describe him: “The most loving person I ever knew.”
But they also knew the hardworking welder had a dark side. He simply never brought it home.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in about 2002, Slaughter did not want to take medication that might have helped with his depression and mood swings. He was afraid of the side effects.
So he did what many others with his diagnosis do. He turned to illegal drugs as a way of medicating himself. To get money for the drugs, he turned to crime. But he wasn’t very good at it. The last bad move to land him in jail was an attempt to walk out of a big-box store with a TV.
“It was stuff like that,” said one of his daughters, Kayla Hollars of Moline. “He did some bad things, but it was all tied to the mental illness. He never used drugs when he was around us. He never physically hurt anyone. He couldn’t. He wasn’t made that way.”
Slaughter could more reliably be counted on to protect his family, play on the floor with the children, show off another big fish he pulled out of the river and infect everyone around him with his laugh.
When the bipolar disorder came to call, he often took off, shielding his family from the behavioral fallout of the illness. The depression was impossible to hide.
“He was pretty much an open book about who he was,” Hollars said.
“His one fear was being alone,” added his sister, Kassandra Walters of Colona.
But the fear and depression seemed to be on the shelf in July 2006. In fact, the last letter his mother received from him from the jail was “really high-spirited,” his sisters said.
“He was asking for regular clothes that he could wear at the hospital when they came to get him,” said his other sister, Kim Bowden, also of Colona. “He was looking forward to getting some help.”
The next day, he killed himself.
Five long months
Slaughter had tried suicide at least twice before.
He had been an off-and-on patient at Robert Young Mental Health Center, family members said.
Despite his history with Robert Young, the bipolar diagnosis and the previous suicide attempts, he spent months in the Rock Island County Jail with no medication, no treatment and no mental health evaluation. He was not put on suicide watch.
After more than three months in jail, one of his public defenders asked for a psychiatric evaluation, which concluded Slaughter was unfit to stand trial.
All those months in jail were more than he could take.
“The Department of Human Services coming to get him a lot faster is what would have helped him,” Rock Island County State’s Attorney Jeff Terronez said. “Judge (Ray) Conklin has developed a hell of a relationship with DHS since we started the mental health court. Things would be different today.”
Ironically, Slaughter’s suicide had a lot to do with Conklin’s relationship with DHS. And it was largely Slaughter’s death that cinched the judge’s resolve to get help for mentally ill inmates who were left to languish in the county jail.
“He (Slaughter) would be handled completely differently now,” Conklin said. “He’d have come to somebody’s attention. He would’ve been evaluated.”
About seven months before Slaughter’s death, at least two other county officials were pushing to get something done about prisoners like him — people with mental-health issues who would not be committing crimes if not for their other problems.
Sheriff’s Capt. Steve Dean was the jail administrator in December 2005 and sent a memo to Court Administrator Vicki Bluedorn, who Dean said shared his frustrations over the treatment of mentally ill inmates.
“It frustrated me greatly,” he said. “We were getting all these people who were not criminals but are mentally ill. They weren’t medicated. They were drinking their own urine and eating their own feces. There were assaults on correctional officers.
“It was inhumane, all the way around.”
Sixteen months after Dean wrote his memo and nine months after Slaughter’s suicide, the Rock Island County Mental Health Court opened for business for the first time.
Today, there are at least 20 people with diagnosed mental illnesses who appear there — sometimes every week. Some still land back in jail, sometimes for failing a drug test or missing a dose of court-ordered medication.
The system is imperfect, say the people who are creating it, but it is better than what came before, which, too often, was nothing. A person still has the right to refuse to take medication, and no one can be forced to admit they need it.
Slaughter never did.
“My dad would be really happy that people are getting the help they need, but he didn’t see himself as having a mental illness,” Hollars said. “He thought his problem was drugs.”
Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.
CONTRIBUTERS TO CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
Charles Slaughter Jr., 43, of Colona, Ill., was diagnosed with bipolar disorder several years before he hanged himself in the Rock Island County Jail in July 2006. The disorder is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses in the United States.
Schizophrenia and major depressive disorder are the other most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses and frequently contribute, authorities say, to criminal behavior and, consequently, imprisonment.
-- Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, is a medical illness that causes extreme shifts in mood, energy and functioning. These changes may be subtle or dramatic and typically vary greatly over the course of a person’s life as well as among individuals. More than 10 million people in America have bipolar disorder, and the illness affects men and women equally.
-- Major depression is a serious medical illness affecting 15 million American adults, or approximately 5 to 8 percent of the adult population. Unlike normal emotional experiences of sadness, loss or passing mood states, major depression is persistent and can significantly interfere with an individual’s thoughts, behavior, mood, activity and physical health. Among all medical illnesses, major depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and many other developed countries.
-- Schizophrenia is a serious and challenging medical illness, an illness that affects more than 2 million American adults, which is about 1 percent of the population age 18 and older. Although it is often feared and misunderstood, schizophrenia is a treatable medical condition. Schizophrenia often interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, distinguish reality from fantasy, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others.
Source: National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI.
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