Editorial: Lives in the balance

Monday, March 12, 2007 | 7:36 a.m.

Ap proaching a legislative panel and asking for your program's funding to be doubled is an exercise in futility - unless you have the kind of statistics Jackie Glass put together.

Then you have a chance. Or should have a chance.

Glass, a District Court judge, is administrator of Clark County's Mental Health Court. She described the success of this program last week before the Senate/Assembly Joint Subcommittee on General Government.

The court has sufficient funding to work with about 75 people at a time. Glass testified that as of June 30, those enrolled in the program had experienced, as a group, an 89 percent drop in their total number of arrests on felony and misdemeanor charges. As a result, they spent a total of 12,257 fewer days in jail than they had in the two years before enrolling in the program.

"But for their mental illness, these people would not be committing these crimes," Glass said.

Numbers were only part of Glass' presentation, though. The real story was in the lives that had been turned around. One woman, for example, in the years before she joined the program, could barely function. Her children had been taken away and she was a frequent inmate at the county jail. Today she is employed, emotionally stable and has regained custody of her children.

Glass is asking for a total budget of $2 million - twice the current budget - for the Mental Health Court, so that the enrollment can be doubled. The two- to three-year program includes counseling, education, housing, medical treatment, food stipends and transportation for the participants.

In our view, this extra money would be easily recovered in reduced law enforcement costs alone. And it would be an even better investment in people's lives.