According to a 2024 report from Adult Correctional Health, about 90% of inmates in the Sacramento County jail awaiting a sentence have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, according to a 2024 report from Adult Correctional Health. This jail is Sacramento County’s most important mental health facility, and instead of progress toward better care, legislation threatens to make things worse
State Assemblymember Stephanie Nguyen, D-Elk Grove, introduced Assembly Bill 46, seeking to derail an existing life-line for incarcerated people with mental health diagnoses (a process called mental health diversion). This bill would make it harder for these people to get the mental health care that they need and make it easier to simply punish them. Now is not the time to double down on a broken system.
Mental health diversion is a pretrial program that diverts people away from incarceration and connects them to relevant mental health and substance use treatment in situations when those needs were a significant factor in the circumstances leading to an individual’s arrest. Rather than perpetuating cycles of harm via incarceration, mental health diversion connects people with services that address the root cause of their behavior and supports access to basic necessities like housing…