Sitrep - June 6th, 2015

Statement

The House moved two more appropriations bills this week. So, why does that matter? Well, as you've heard me say before, the appropriations process is the only way your representatives have the chance to go through the budget line by line and adjust things to reflect your priorities. No appropriations process, no prioritization process.

Case in point, I was able to continue my efforts from last year to shift resources from the bloated census budget into treatment courts for veterans and inviduals suffering from mental health issues.

In short, jails are not good places to treat mental illness. And if you are going to address the underlying reason why certain people keep finding their way back to jail, then you need to do something different. According to a data compiled by the Florida Mental Health Institute, over the course of five years, ninety-seven individuals in Miami-Dade County accounted for 2,200 bookings in the county jail, 27,000 days served, and another 13,000 in crisis units, state hospitals and emergency rooms.

The cost to the taxpayers for booking and jailing those ninety-seven individuals? $13 million… And that's just one county in Florida. Imagine the cost nationwide.

A separate program down in Pinellas County was able to reduce re-arrests of 3,000 offenders enrolled in the program by 87%. In other words, if you deal with mental health challenges the correct way, you don't have to keep using taxpayer money to keep re-arresting, jailing, releasing, and re-arresting again the same people many times over (with no end in sight). It's not good for anybody. It's not good for the individual in question, it's not good for the would-be future victims, it's not good for law enforcement, and it's certainly not good for the taxpayers.

Right now, we spend about $7 million at the federal level on mental health courts and about $5 million on veterans' treatment courts. Again, that's what Miami-Dade spent all by itself repeatedly jailing the same set of mentally unwell individuals.

In any case, I made my pitch to my colleagues and last year I was able to boost the two twin programs by about 28% and 40% respectively. This year, because we've been able to continue raising some awareness about the results nationwide, I apparently inspired a few of my colleagues to follow on with a few amendments of their own. All told, this year, we almost doubled the funding for mental health treatment courts and we tripled the funding available for veterans' treatment courts. To do that, we had to make offsetting cuts elsewhere in the budget.

If the House and Senate don't do an appropriations bill, members of Congress never have the chance to adjust things according to new priorities. Things just stay flat from where they were last year. If we spent too much over there and not enough over here, then that's just the way it will have to be year after year after year. That's no way to run things. This is just one example. Each appropriations bill has hundreds and hundreds of amendments. Some are adopted, some are rejected, but by and large it is a simple example of the people's representatives doing the most basic part of their jobs. So while we still have a long road back from many years of can-kicking, this was another good week for those of us who believe that Congress should budget carefully -- no excuses.

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