Hundreds of mentally ill people are languishing for months in South Carolina jails, deprived of needed treatment in a legal purgatory that feeds a cycle of incarceration, despair and avoidable deaths. Too sick to stand trial, these defendants remain stuck between slow-moving courts and an overloaded psychiatric system, trapped in county jails ill-equipped to care for them.
The Wait for Competency Treatment
The holdup for court-ordered competency restoration treatment has grown increasingly worse, now dragging out for eight months on average. South Carolina uses a system in which a judge orders a clinical evaluation when a defendant’s competency is questioned. Treatment, if needed, consists of medication, basic education about legal procedures and targeted therapy. According to Circuit Judge Frank Addy, who serves as a liaison between the courts and the state Office of Mental Health, “Restoration is not treatment in any sense of the word. It is a very, very minimal effort to get that person to understand how court works.”
Case Example: Gregory Bryant
Gregory Bryant’s journey illustrates the cycle. He spent 880 days incarcerated, with it taking about 11 months for his competency evaluation, six more months before admission to a psychiatric hospital, and two additional months of restoration treatment before a judge deemed him unfit to stand trial. Charleston County spends around $104 a day to house a typical inmate, but it can cost up to three times more for a mentally ill offender, making Bryant’s stay cost around $274,000 to taxpayers.
Systemic Bottleneck
The facility conducting most restoration treatment, G. Werber Bryan in Columbia, had a 165-person waiting list in March with just 213 beds for criminal defendants — the same number for decades. Meanwhile, the state’s population has swelled by more than a million people over the past 20 years. South Carolina now ranks third from the bottom in access to mental health care, surpassing only Texas and Alabama. Some 706,000 adults in the state have a mental health condition, more than four times the population of Charleston, the state’s largest city.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/special_reports/nav-3/mental-health-competency-defendants-waits-jails/article_92154110-7643-41ee-a2a6-e73ae3d79d9e.html