Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Project offers a better way to get alcoholics off the streets

Some valley officials and advocates for the homeless are looking to a San Diego program as a possible solution to the s practice of repeatedly filling jail cells with the same drunks.

The Serial Inebriate Program has shown success at lowering arrests and saving money in emergency rooms and jails since it began in 2000, San Diego Police Officer John Liening told about 40 private and public officials Thursday.

Liening and Deni McLagan, program manager for Mental Health Systems Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides some of the services to people in the program, came to speak to the diverse group of agencies that have contact with the homeless locally at the invitation of Linda Lera-Randle El, director of Straight from the Streets, a nonprofit organization.

The audience included officials from Metro Police, Clark County Social Service Director Darryl Martin, District Attorney David Roger, state mental health workers and a number of private agencies.

But several local officials, while interested in the program and its potential application in the Las Vegas Valley, said two key players were missing from the audience -- Las Vegas' city attorney and Municipal Court.

"One of the problems I see here today is that the city attorney and municipal judges are not here -- and most of the arrests go through that system," said Phil Kohn, Clark County public defender.

"Unfortunately we don't have the right people at the table today," he said.

Repeated calls seeking comment from Las Vegas City Attorney Brad Jerbic were not returned Thursday.

Jerbic's equivalent in San Diego is one of the participants in the program. It involves at least 14 public and private agencies working together with San Diego city and county funding to solve a problem that Liening referred to as "a revolving door" -- alcoholics, mostly homeless, get arrested, sent to a detoxification center, put in jail, and are then released to go through the same all over again.

These are people who are "drunk every day -- some for 15, 20 years -- and have basically given up on everything and figure they'll die on the street," Liening said.

Many of them are also mentally ill, "but they never ... focus on mental health because they're not sober long enough," he said.

The program centers on judges offering treatment instead of jail time.

Liening said the five-year-old program has been able to find employment or some sort of benefits for 85 percent of those who spent six months in the program, and housing for 100 percent.

It costs taxpayers $6,000 for a year of housing and treatment for each participant, compared with $4,700 for each emergency medical services episode, McLagan said.

In the Las Vegas Valley, a group called the Chronic Public Inebriate Task Force said in 2002 that alcoholics and the mentally ill cost taxpayers about $20 million a year as the drunks are shuffled in and out of emergency rooms and jails.

Most so-called nuisance crimes that are charged to drunks in the valley wind up in the Las Vegas Municipal Court, where Jerbic began pursuing longer sentences in August as a way of deterring repeat offenders.

That is why several in the audience Thursday reacted strongly to the absence of officials from the two agencies.

"You'd think it would be in their interest to come to an event like this," Lera-Randle El said.

Michael Ware, assistant court administrator for Eighth Judicial District Court, said, "it would be, because of the simple fact that misdemeanor offences wind up there."

Also, Ware said, increasing sentences doesn't work for populations such as the mentally ill or alcoholic, "who don't view punishment in the same way as criminals."

"Therapy as opposed to the punitive approach works with certain populations -- the carrot instead of the stick," he said.

Liening said that "longer sentences don't deal with the alcoholism."

"If you put an alcoholic in jail, what is he when he gets out? Still an alcoholic."

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy