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LA County Wants To Compensate Incarcerated People Caring For Peers Living With Mental Illnesses
Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
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Andrew Cullen
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for LAist
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The L.A. County Board of Supervisors threw additional support this week behind a program in which incarcerated people volunteer to care for peers living with a mental illness behind bars.
Since 2018, incarcerated peer caregivers — or mental health assistants, as they’re called — have worked to assist people living with serious mental illness inside L.A. County jails.
Mentors like Craigen Armstrong do everything from encouraging people to take their medication to helping them cut their toenails. Right now, they’re doing that work for free.
Craigen Armstrong (center) is a co-founder of the Mental Health Assistants program
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LA County Board of Supervisors meeting screenshot
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“This is the future. And we believe this is how incarceration should look. And this motion really provides a model and an example for others to follow throughout not only the state, but through this country,” Armstrong told county supervisors at their meeting Tuesday.
The motion, which was unanimously approved, directs the Sheriff and Correctional Health to look into ways to provide incentives like wages, academic support and credits for early release for mental health assistants.
It also directs county workers to assess the feasibility of allowing assistants to serve their prison sentences in county jails so that they can continue to do this work.
"Our Mental Health Assistants volunteer their time and skills to support the most vulnerable patients in the jails and are with their patients 24/7 with no breaks to handle or ponder on their individual lives and circumstances, including their legal issues," Supervisor Hilda Solis, the motion’s co-author, said in a statement.
The assistants work out of the Forensic In-Patient (FIP) step-down units, which are meant to be more therapeutic environments for people living with a mental illness who are the sickest within the jails, a smaller subset of the overall jail mental health population.
There are currently about 20 incarcerated people volunteering as mental health assistants and more than 5,000 people in L.A. County jail with mental health needs.
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