Sociology Mind 2014. Vol.4, No.1, 31-35 Published Online January 2014 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/sm ) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sm.2014.41004 Public Sector Responses to Jail Mental Health: A Review with Recommendations for Future Research Ronald Helms 1 , Ricky S. Gutierrez 2 , Debra Reeves-Gutierrez 3 1 Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, USA 2 California State University, Sacramento, Sacramento, California, USA 3 Alliant International University, San Francisco, California, USA Email: Ronald.Helms@wwu.edu , rickyg@csus.edu , dreeves@alliant.edu Received October 9 th , 2013; revised November 21 st , 2013; accepted December 13 th , 2013 Copyright © 2014 Ronald Helms et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In accordance of the Creative Commons Attribution License all Copyrights © 2014 are reserved for SCIRP and the owner of the intellectual property Ronald Helms et al. All Copyright © 2014 are guarded by law and by SCIRP as a guardian. The history of public mental health intervention in the US has been uneven and in some instances is cha- racterized by a strong overtone of neglect. While clinical research in primarily private settings has gener- ated findings that give a strong sense of “what works” in mental health diagnosis and treatment, this re- view pays special attention to the distribution of mental illness among jailed populations. Local jail sys- tems house a substantial number of mentally challenged individuals but receive less attention than is war- ranted given their numbers. This paper concludes with a plea for research with a focus on the community determinants of mental health systems in order to enhance delivery of services and increase the likelihood of reaching those most in need of mental health treatment. Keywords: Mental Health; Jails; Community Mental Health; Mental Health Research; Society and Mental Health Introduction What seems to work in the field of mental health treatment? Researchers, primarily in the US, have documented through a substantial number of published studies, a series of answers to this question. In the research note that follows, we summarize the field of research with the intent to bring into a single space, a brief on the history of mental health intervention as well as findings regarding “what works” from the scholarly literature. Since so many mentally ill individuals are discovered through the intake process at county jails throughout the country, and become subsequently “consumers of services” while incarcera- ted in local jail facilities, we focus special attention on this cri- tical aspect of mental health populations and delivery systems. Doing so will allow for an assessment of questions that are less clear cut and help direct attention to where research should fo- cus in light of austere fiscal conditions and shifting parameters of privatized support for intervention in the mental health field. Review of the Literature The US Experience with Mental Illness Mental health care at the level of the individual has been the focus of concern throughout a substantial portion of American history, and in particular during the past 150 years. The scho- larly literature features a wide range of studies on mental health issues, primarily focused on individual-level experiences, di- agnostic issues, and treatment effects. Although there is docu- mented evidence of substantial rates of occurrence of mental illness in the developmental stages of our nation, the first at- tempt to officially document the extent of mental illness and mental retardation occurred with the inclusion of the categories insane and idiotic during the collection of the Census of 1840. By the late 1800s mental health crusaders such as Dorothy Dix (1843; 1975) were instrumental in establishing and expanding the state hospital system for the treatment and care of mentally ill patients, thereby relieving to some extent, the burden of care for these populations to the ill-equipped almshouses and local jails (Torrey, Kennard, Eslinger, Lamb, & Pavle, 2010). Be- tween 1850 and 1869, 35 new state hospitals were established, and by 1890 another 59 additional state hospitals were estab- lished. Those institutions being built after 1870 were substan- tially larger than those built earlier in order to accommodate more patients who represented an expanding scope of mental and physical of conditions (Staples, 1990). The process of esta- blishing state hospitals for the mentally ill, largely initiated by Dix, continued to evolve and expand throughout the early 1950s, reaching its zenith by mid-decade. At the high point, state facilities for involuntary commit- ments of the mentally ill housed approximately 557,000 people (Kerle, 2004). After years of controversy and documented abuse of mental patients confined to such facilities, a federal court ruling issued in Wyatt v. Stickney (1972) led to the wide- spread deinstitutionalization of those mentally ill persons invo- luntarily committed to state institutions and who did not fit within a narrowly defined description, to wit, the presence of documented evidence that institutional confinement was re- OPEN ACCESS 31