St. Tammany fails to provide adequate mental health screenings and assessments, treatment, and medication management for its prisoners with mental illness. Prisoners therefore wait several weeks and sometimes months before they are treated by mental health professionals and the care that they eventually receive falls below constitutional minimal and generally accepted professional standards.
St. Tammany provides grossly inadequate suicide prevention care. Prior to and during our investigation, these practices included placing prisoners with mental illnesses in booking cages (“squirrel cages”
. For some time, St. Tammany’s policy clearly established that booking ages were only to be used as a mechanism of last resort, yet we routinely found instances where booking cages were used to house prisoners with suicidal ideation, regardless of other available housing options. Though St. Tammany told us that they abandoned this practice in September 2011, unless and until we are able to verify that the changes described to us are clearly set out in policy and procedure, and these changes in policy and procedures are fully implemented, we remain concerned that this long overdue improvement in the Jail’s treatment of suicidal prisoners will not be realized.