The Travis County Mental and Behavioral Health Diversion Center opened its doors more than five years ago and needed more each day, the Commissioners Court heard Tuesday.
With an epidemic of intellectual illness and an overcrowded Travis County jail, commissioners said the county wants to build the center as temporarily as possible through the involvement of affected network groups. The assignment also includes a new reserve center for the prison.
Commissioners voted in March to create the new center following recommendations from Dell School of Medicine. In Travis County, 37% of people incarcerated in October 2021 were receiving intellectual fitness care at the jail, the medical school reported. By May 2022, this rate had risen to 42 percent.
The diversion center will be a component of the “intervention system” the county is developing to keep others with serious intellectual fitness and substance abuse issues out of jail, said Tyronne Jolly, senior manager of the intellectual aptitude diversion program. the Commissioners.
“There are many such formulas that serve the members of the network well,” he said.
Examples include crisis response systems, intellectual competency courts, criminal integration systems, and “reintegration” systems that offer links to solid housing and other needs. Experience gained with those systems will shape the new diversion center, Jolly said.
Regarding the project timeline, Gabriel Stock, the county’s interim director of service management, said it would take 18 months to design the center, 32 months to build it and 4 months to transition.
“This is a task of about five and a half years once the qualification application is issued,” he said.
The Request for Qualifications will identify the architectural and engineering design team to complete operations planning, benchmark the initial center site, and design the facility.
Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez said the new reservation service is mandatory because the existing facility is “small and outdated” and limits filing through the sheriff’s branch and its partners. He noted that the diversion center is vital because the inmate population continues to grow.
“Today, our criminal population is larger than it has been in a long time: 2,343 people. Moving forward with the diversion center is very important for TCSO,” Hernandez said.
District 1 Commissioner Jeff Travillion said he would like to see network partners shape the new center.
“We identified what pastors see, what fitness professionals see online, and where they’ll look for resources now, and there’s a logical connection for this type of project,” he said.
Travis County Judge Andy Brown said he expected the task to move quickly.
“What the sheriff has said about the number of other people incarcerated and what the House is doing to further increase that number warrants taking action as temporarily as possible,” he said. I agree with Commissioner Travillion, I need to make sure we get it right. “
Mental health-related diversion is a developing trend in law enforcement. Diversion centers to the proposed Travis County have been built in communities across the country.
Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4. 0, Wikimedia Commons.
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