Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Thank you, Chairman Wolf and Ranking Member Fattah, for your leadership and tireless work on this bill.

Madam Chairman, my amendment would add $2 million to the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act programs. This will partially restore these programs to presequestration levels and provide desperately needed funding for increasing the collaboration between our Nation's criminal justice and mental health systems.

My amendment is offset by the Department of Justice's general administration account. While I recognize the importance of funding the DOJ, this amendment amounts to less than two-tenths of 1 percent of DOJ's total administrative budget.

Even though this $2 million investment is modest, it will have a tremendous impact on existing State and local law enforcement agencies all across the country to provide a broad range of mental health services, including mental health courts, mental health and substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation and community reentry services, and training for State and local law enforcement to help them identify and improve responses to people with mental illnesses.

I want to particularly express my support for crisis intervention training for State and local police officers, which receives funding through the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act.

Officer encounters with mentally ill individuals during crises too often end in tragedy. Crisis intervention training can help prevent injuries to officers, alleviate harm to the person in crisis, promote the decriminalization of individuals with mental illness, and reduce the stigma associated with mental disorders.

We can all agree that the mental health and criminal justice systems in this country are failing the American people. Focused more on prosecution than on prevention and rehabilitation, jail is often used as a de facto holding area for the mentally ill.

The Department of Justice estimates that 64 percent of local jail inmates and 56 percent of State inmates have symptoms of severe mental illness.

Without treatment, rehabilitation, and community reentry services, these individuals are much more likely to spend their lives in and out of the prison system. In fact, 81 percent of mentally ill inmates in State prison and 79 percent of mentally ill inmates in local jails have had prior convictions.

Considering that it takes more money to keep a person in jail for a year than to send him or her to college, we cannot afford to do nothing.

I believe my amendment is in the spirit of this bill's goal of investing in prevention and rehabilitation in order to reduce recidivism and long-term incarceration costs.

I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and ensure that our criminal justice and mental health systems have the funds that they need to serve this country's most vulnerable people.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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