Week after week, Barbara Vassis watches as her daughter sinks deeper into a delusional world while sitting in a Boulder, Colo., jail cell.
Vassis can still picture Erin Brown as a gifted artist and chef who bubbled with energy. But last summer the 32-year-old, who had long battled schizoaffective disorder and struggled with meth addiction, was charged with breaking into her mother’s home. Vassis said her daughter stole tools, electronics and other valuables, as well as her pickup truck.
Brown was found not competent to stand trial. A judge ordered that she receive inpatient psychiatric treatment so she could face the charges.
Nine months after her arrest, Colorado’s state hospitals still have no free bed for her.
An exploding number of mentally ill jail inmates is overwhelming space in psychiatric hospitals across the U.S., a Wall Street Journal analysis of state data shows. It is a mounting crisis as more inmates languish in jail without court-ordered treatment, not convicted and unable to stand trial.
Brown is among around 450 inmates in Colorado alone stuck in this situation, their condition often steadily deteriorating. She now writes rambling letters to her mother, saying she is finishing up details to save the universe and has met her husband, somebody named Brandon.
State mental-health and jail officials are frustrated but say they are struggling against a tide of people in crisis. “It’s such an inept system we are working in…She has been here 226 days, as of today,” the Boulder jail’s mental-health supervisor, Pam Levett, wrote to Vassis in April about her daughter.