Irene and Riker's Island

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, thousands of inmates were left locked in jails and prisons for days while the rest of the city evacuated. 

I just read an article in Solitary Watch titled "Locked Up and Left Behind: Hurricane Irene and the Prisoner's on New York's Rikers Island", and realized that though I wour with the criminal justice population, I had completely forgotten about what would happen to the people loacked up in the many deteniton facilities around the city. But it looks like I wasn't the only one. 

A few days after Hurricane Irene came sweeping up the east coast without causing major damage to New York City, it is easy to brush of the mandatory evacuations as just the city being overly cautious. But the day before the hurricane was to hit, the city was a in a panic. I was anxiously following developments and the mandatory evacuation of low lying areas of the city. Nearly everyone I know filled their bathtubs on Saturday night and charged their phones, convinced that we'd be without power and wake up to howling winds. The anxiety was real and the possiblity for some major damage was as well. However, with all of the preparations made by the city, including shutting down the entire public transportation system, Riker's Island was not evacuated. it wasn't even in an evacuation zone, though built on a landfill and surrounded by water. In fact, the Department of Corrections admitted that there was no evacation plan for the 12,000 prisoners on Riker's Island. We are lucky that Irene didn't hit. Many of us were a little bummed out that it really seemed like NOTHING happened in the city aside froma few downed branches (we do realize that parts of the country were really devastated). But when we think about what could've happened had the storm been a little bit worse, I think we can all agree that we avoided a major tragedy. Had Irene lived up to her forecast, we don't know if we would be facing a Katrina-like situation with a vulnerable, immobile population trapped in locked cells full of water. I hope that the city DOES create an evacation plan. No matter what crime someone committed (and Riker's is a jail housing mostly midsdemeanor and low-level felony offenders usually serving no more than a year), they don't deserve to be abandoned or forgotten.

This is why we need a continuum of care

I just read an article in the NYTimes 8/3/2011 titled "Teenager's Path and a Killing put Spotlight on mental Care"  about a young man with a violent past, severe mental illness and trauma history, who killed a staff member at a transitional housing shelter in Massachusetts. It's a tragic story that, as you follow the paper trail, led to the inevitable conclusion of murder. Foster homes, instability, violence, psychiatric care, criminal charges.... This young man was known within the system, but the parts of the system didn't communicate with each other. The police didn't know about the mental illness, the psych hospital didn't know about the violence, the homeless shelter didn't know about any of it. A friend of mine is working on a city-wide system to enroll mentally ill clients at the hospital into a program where their information is shared with other city agencies. So if the police show up, they'd be able to find out that this individual is schizophrenic and receiving treatment, and can connect with their treatment provider, creating a continuum of care. I acknowledge that it is a lot of information for government agencies to have about you, but they already have it and it does them no good to have it all, locked away on a computer somewhere, if it can't be used to actually help. This case is just one of many that exemplifies why information sharing is vital, especially as funding for mental health services is cut.