Martin Kumer – Page 2 – C-VILLE Weekly

Proposed court docket would offer treatment programs for incarcerated

Increasingly, jails have become asylums. City and county officials are hoping to change that with a new court docket aimed at diverting people with mental illness from jail by the end of the year.

The therapeutic docket follows 18 months of data gathering by the local Evidence-Based Decision-Making Policy Team, which found that 23.1 percent of inmates—495 people—at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail met the criteria for serious mental illness.

“It gave us confidence that we had the numbers for a mental health docket,” says Pat Smith, the executive director of Offender Aid and Restoration, which handles local probation and re-entry services. “We still don’t know how quickly our docket will populate. We don’t even know that we’ll be approved yet.”

Earlier this year, General District Court Judge Robert Downer applied to the Virginia Supreme Court to form the new docket. Smith says they expect to hear back as soon as November, and could get underway by December. Separately, a $64,504 state grant has funded a docket coordinator position through June, speeding its implementation if it is approved.

Mental health dockets are becoming increasingly popular throughout the country as a type of problem-solving court, similar to the drug court that began in Charlottesville two decades ago. The docket is voluntary and offers people who qualify a chance at reducing or dismissing their misdemeanor criminal charges upon completion of a lengthy regimented treatment program, which lasts anywhere from six to 24 months.

Nearby, the Staunton and Augusta County mental health docket launched three years ago, and has graduated 14 people, with about a dozen others currently enrolled, says Dave Pastors, the director of Blue Ridge Court Services. Graduates have gone back to college, started businesses and reconnected with estranged family, re-establishing their support networks, says Pastors.

Representatives from the commonwealth’s attorney, the public defender, Region Ten and OAR would all help Judge Downer oversee a Charlottesville-area docket—with the commonwealth’s attorney having ultimate veto power over anybody being considered for entry into the program. Officials say that often a mental illness is directly linked to a person’s crime—trespassing, destruction of property, petty larceny.

Martin Kumer, the superintendent of the ACRJ, says the docket is a win-win. “In Virginia, the largest mental health provider in any community is the jail,” says Kumer. “I would much rather have my staff dealing with people who are here for criminal activity, rather than mentally ill people who are here for criminal activity. It’s expensive, and we are not equipped to deal with them.”

Neal Goodloe, the criminal justice planner for the Thomas Jefferson Community Criminal Justice Board, oversaw the collection of the data at the ACRJ and says a docket may help cut down on local recidivism rates too. According to the study, a small number of people—5.6 percent—were incarcerated four or more times. But that group made up 21 percent of the jail’s total bookings, and 33 percent of that group—a higher percentage than the overall population—showed signs of serious mental illness.

Goodloe says the numbers did not reveal any racial disproportionalities among people with serious mental illness, but that untreated mental health issues were more common among women than men. The study did not analyze data based on income level or age.

Bailed out: Local jail isn’t a debtors’ prison

This past Mother’s Day, a new political organization found an unusual way of observing the holiday: By standing in front of the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail holding signs in support of certain classes of incarcerated women.

The group, Southerners On New Ground, is a national group working to establish a local chapter. SONG wrote in a press release, “In Charlottesville, too many black women are being denied bond. Even though we have raised the money to bail out local black mamas, they are being forced to stay in jail while they await their trial due to overly harsh prosecutors and Virginia’s unfair presumptions against bond.”

It turns out that isn’t quite true at the local jail.

According to Superintendent Martin Kumer, there were a total of 30 women being held in the jail at the time of the demonstration.

“At that time we didn’t have anyone who could be released [if a bond was paid],” Kumer says. “That’s not surprising. Any time we do those reports like that we might have five to 10 people in the whole jail—men and women out of 453 as of right now—who if they posted bond could be released.”

When a suspect is arrested and charged with a crime, there are three types of decisions a judge can make: Release the suspect on her own recognizance without paying any money; set bail and require her to come up with cash for freedom until her trial date; or decide the suspect is either a flight risk or a danger to others and keep her in jail.

According to local SONG organizer Lyndsey Beutin, the group doesn’t have any evidence for the claim that a high number of black and/or LGBT women are being held without bond in the local jail.

Roberta Williamson, a long-time local activist for poor people charged with crimes (she’s not formally affiliated with SONG), believes the bail system has turned into a modern form of debtors’ prison and should be reformed.

“For some people, putting up bail means not paying rent, not buying food, not buying an inhaler for a kid. It puts people in a horrible position,” Williamson says. “Now, if someone has murdered someone that’s one thing. If someone has been picked up because they are driving when they are sober after they’ve lost their license for driving while intoxicated, they’re going to go to jail. …One person that I know was picked up on her way to pick up her sick son. …On the other hand, wealthy people I know who have lost their license can use Uber.”

Nationwide, a movement is growing to eliminate bail money entirely. Even Kumer spoke in support of that idea.

“Studies have shown that people who get released on cash bonds or released on no cash bond, there’s no difference in terms of who shows up for court,” Kumer says. “It really doesn’t matter.”

The 30 women who were being held on Mother’s Day had been denied bail due to the particulars of their cases, he says. Not because they didn’t have enough money.

There are those who pose a danger who should not be out on bond, Kumer explains, sitting in his office in the same building on Avon Street where now-convicted serial killer Jesse Matthew was held pending trial.

“I mean let’s face it, we have had some pretty heinous crimes come through Charlottesville,” he says. “Serial rapists, serial murderers. [Jesse Matthew], people wouldn’t have thought that he was a danger to society until he was caught. But when we look back on things he had done and things we think he has done, would you want him back out on the street?”

Kumer also thinks that Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s judges and prosecutors are already working to prevent the jail from being used as a debtors’ prison.

Charlottesville allows most of those arrested to be released on a signature bond without putting up any money, says Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania. “We do not use secured bonds in this community as a general rule,” he says. “Poor people in jail because they can’t post bond—it is rare.”

“That we don’t have a lot of people sitting here who can’t afford to pay bonds shows that our local judges and commonwealth’s attorneys, what discretion they do have, they are using it to ensure that people who don’t need to be in jail aren’t in jail,” Kumer says.

“If more speeders, businessmen, got held in jail for two weeks, you’d have a [state level] policy change,” Williamson says. “But because it is people who have very little voice and who are very worried about risking everything they have if they raise their voice, it’s up to people like me to do a little noise-making.”