Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Jail Mental Health Coroner Costs topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Richland County leaders flag jail mental-health bottlenecks, autopsy costs and coroner workload
Summary
District Attorney Harper and the coroner described repeated cases of people with severe mental illness held in the county jail while awaiting competency evaluations and long waits for state mental health beds; officials also raised concerns about autopsy costs and coroner fee coverage.
District Attorney Harper told the Richland County Public Safety Committee on Sept. 5 that the county is seeing people with serious mental-health needs held in the jail while they await competency evaluations and placement, and that state bed shortages and evaluation procedures are creating repeated delays.
The issue matters because jail custody is not a therapeutic environment and can leave individuals with severe illness stuck in custody for weeks while they wait for state inpatient placement, Harper said. "She is currently number 128 on the list for a bed in a mental health institution," Harper said, describing one person undergoing a competency process.
Harper told the committee that county officials have struggled to get civil (Chapter 51) evaluations while a person is in custody, because evaluators often decline to commit individuals who are already in jail. "If you're in the jail, you are not a danger to yourself or others," Harper said, and that can disqualify a person from a civil commitment even when staff fear they would be unsafe if released.
The coroner, Jim Rose, reported earlier in the meeting on caseload and case causes and later joined discussion of autopsy decisions and costs. Rose said a full autopsy done through Dane County typically costs about $1,500 and an additional roughly $150 for transport; toxicology and other testing add further cost. He told the committee his office’s discretionary budget (excluding salaries/benefits) is about $14,000 for the year and that multiple autopsies can quickly exhaust that funding.
Committee members and the county administrator discussed options including charging for records or autopsy-related requests and benchmarking fees and coroner pay against other counties. County staff said they plan to bring more information to the committee on partners’ criteria for requesting autopsies and on possible fee-schedule changes for the coroner’s office.
The district attorney and others also raised ongoing operational problems: when someone in the community clearly needs inpatient mental-health care but does not meet immediate civil-commitment criteria while detained, the only practical pathway to treatment can be an arrest that results in re-evaluation. That cycle, Harper said, creates liabilities for jail staff and public-safety risks for the broader community.
Committee members asked staff to return in a future meeting with details on the partners’ autopsy-request criteria, potential fee options, and options for addressing the jail-to-treatment pathway. The administrator said partners plan to bring information next month on how determinations to request autopsies are made and that the county will consider adding fees to next year’s fee schedule.
The committee did not take formal action on policy changes at the Sept. 5 meeting; members framed this as an ongoing discussion and requested follow-up information.
