Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes has been in law enforcement for more than 30 years. Today, he discusses the relationship between the mental health and wellness of communities and the criminal justice system.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Hello, and welcome to the Hope Happens Here Podcast. This is Kate Gosney-Hoffman, and I'm so glad you're here. Today, we were joined by Sheriff Don Barnes. He is the Orange County sheriff and has been working in law enforcement and keeping Orange County safe for, I think he said nearly three decades. Super grateful to have Sheriff Barnes here so we'll let you take a listen.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Today we are joined by Sheriff Barnes, our Orange County Sheriff. Thank you so much for being here.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Thank you for having me.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Absolutely. It's such an honor and we wanted to just have a conversation today just to get to know you a little bit more and also just your experience and take on the relationship between mental health and the criminal justice system. I know you probably have more than 30 minutes worth to talk about when it comes to those kinds of topics, but maybe we could just start off by hearing a little bit about you and what your role these days looks like and kind of a day in the life of you, these days.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That's an interesting question because I'm getting ready to start my 33rd year in law enforcement coming up soon, and if you asked me that question in 10 year increments, I would give you a different answer every year. When I started in this profession, it was dealing mostly with gangs and narcotics.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Oh wow.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Some cocaine was the drug of the era at that moment and over a certain changes and enforcement postures that kind of subsides and now, over the course of now more than three decades, we are dealing with a lot of social issues, not by design, by default. A lot of the issues that we have that have manifested and fallen on the shoulders of law enforcement to deal with have never been designed or been the destiny of law enforcement professionals to intervene on.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
It makes it very all encompassing. This job today is much more encompassing of a lot of different aspects of societal challenges and things that we are dealing with in law enforcement, not just in the Sheriff's Department, but across a much broader spectrum of public safety, but it does create an opportunity, depending how you look at that. I recently testified on the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, I was on the social issues impacting law enforcement subcommittee and the three issues that I spoke on specifically were homelessness, mental illness and substance use disorder, many of them are interrelated.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
They all kind of are tied together as a much larger issues, and in my testimony, I said, the first person somebody who's experiencing a mental health crisis should come in contact with, should not be a police officer, wearing a uniform and a gun. There's got to be other intervention strategies that are put in place, that are just lacking currently and we've done a great job in Orange County and other areas throughout the state to start putting in place some of these great strategies that will be serving these individuals much better than we can or should be doing that.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That's tied also to homelessness and substance use disorder. Those really are, in many ways, interconnected. Somebody who's experiencing homelessness oftentimes may have a mental illness, sometimes minor, sometimes significant. Sometimes they will have a substance use disorder. Sometimes a substance use disorder drives the mental illness. Sometimes the mental illness is self-medicating with narcotics or alcohol or other drugs. So they're all really tied together and we have to look at it that way and every opportunity we have with the public we serve, has to be looked at through that lens. How can we get somebody out of the criminal justice system into an appropriate intervention strategy to help get them either into sobriety or mental health stability or into housing or whatever that might be, so we don't have to go back and deal with that individual again?
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
That's a very multilayered process, right? Lots of people need to get involved in achieving those goals, getting that person to the right place, assessment, all of that. I mean, so what does that really look like?
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, I use the analogy of Dominos when you're a kid, tipping Dominos up on their side and knocking them over one at a time, it's an ordinal process and right now we're building that domino stack backwards. We're putting in strategies within the Orange County jail and other agencies working with us because that's one area where they oftentimes end up, is within the Orange County jail system.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Right now, well, before COVID-19 in a normal housing environment or normal environment, we would have roughly between 5500-6,000 inmates in the Orange County jail system. On any given day, normally, especially over the course of the last five years before COVID, two out of five inmates entrust in my care have a daily nexus to mental health treatment, that's between 1950-2000 people every day who needs some type of mental health treatment and they oftentimes cycle in and out of the jail on a very routine basis. They just repeatedly come back for criminal violations of law, oftentimes minor violations of law, but they don't come to me because they're mentally ill. They come to me because somebody brings them to me because they committed a criminal offense, either through the courts or through arrest.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That becomes hugely problematic, but also creates an opportunity for me to create an environment where we can treat them and get them into stability. That's true with substance use disorder also, I have between 100-120 people on a normal day that are being medically detoxed, medically supervised detox, off of alcohol and/or drugs, and more than half the population have an addiction issue inside custody. Two out of a ten, one in five will self declare as being homeless. All these things compound, all these issues compound upon themselves and make it very difficult to tie them to services once they get released. We're doing that very well right now, but the issue is, we're doing it while they're in jail.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
The system we have to build out is that domino, we're at Domino 40, which is when they're in jail. We need to put the other 39 ahead of it and start coming up with any intervention strategies and programs to either prevent them from coming to jail in the first place and there are programs that existed for decades that just don't work as well as they used to, because of the way the criminal justice system has changed. I'm not advocating, I just want to be clear, I'm not advocating for incarcerating the drug addicted or the mentally ill, but some of those strategies have changed because there's really no way to entice people into treatment anymore like there was before, because of some of the decriminalization efforts in California for drug offenses and other things.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
I see. So the consequences are less than they used to be and so the choice is not so black or white.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
It is that, when you look at Prop. 47, for example, which was the largest decriminalization initiative that took place in California in the last several years, 2014, it changed the two largest categories of crime that any law enforcement agency or community deals with, property crime and drug crime, and it changed drug crime from felonies to misdemeanors. In order to go to state prison, you have to be convicted of a felony. You can't go to state prison for misdemeanor offenses, and generally speaking, those are served in the county jail, but the time that somebody might be incarcerated for committing one of those offenses is significantly less than it was just seven, eight years ago.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
What that changed for us is the strategies to get somebody into sobriety, for example, is much shorter because there's no longer that hook into somebody to entice them into treatment, in lieu of going to state prison for a felony conviction. So I understand the social justice issues and all those things, but I'm just talking from the real-world experience of how it makes it difficult to help people who really need help and sometimes save them from themselves and getting them into treatment opportunities for those types of issues and mental illness is in the same conditions today. We've seen, over the course of the last five years, our mental health populations increased 60%. That number goes up every year.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
What do you think has changed? The same, what you were just talking about in terms of the changes in the system, or do you think there has been, have there been other things going on to contribute to this? Because like you said, every 10 years it's looked different for you, in comparing and contrasting maybe 10 years ago, a decade ago, what would be your opinion? And I know this is not a simple answer. Not everybody knows everything, but what would be the difference, why is the mental health needs gone up, you think, from your experience?
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, the closure at state hospitals, obviously the last several state hospitals closed in the last several years. The lack of programs available for people in crisis and this has changed in recent years. We have more programs now and more availability of resources, but having somewhere to take somebody in mental health crisis, just until a few years ago, Orange County, a population of 3.2 million residents, we had 10 crisis stabilization beds for adults in the entire county. 10 to serve 3.2 million people and of course not all those are in crisis. The change of the increase in the homeless population oftentimes have a need for services and that's a very difficult population to extend services to. If somebody is SPMI, severely or persistently mentally ill, which is the highest categorization of mental illness, it takes, on average, nine to 10 outreach efforts with any one individual in that categorization to develop a trusting relationship where they might even consider accepting services.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Then the worst thing we had done, I think, previous, I'm not picking on the system or any one part of the system so I don't want people to take it that way but we looked at this very compartmentalized. We didn't triage an individual. It was what one thing do they need, of the many things they need and try to do one of those things at a time and if we didn't do that well, and we lost that individual out of trust, getting them to re-engage in their own future opportunity to get into stability became much more difficult. I'm just looking at this from not only the law enforcement perspective and our outreach efforts, but also the clinicians we work with over time, that have been able to help tag team, if you will, some of these things. So we've changed. We don't do it that way anymore, at least not in Orange County.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
We look at every opportunity we have for outreach, to triage an individual, bring all the resources that person may need, and those resources that are available to them, based on whatever status they might be. For example, a veteran would have veteran services available that they may not be aware of and so we bring all those to them at one time and try to saturate them with these services. We do the same thing inside the Orange County jail, currently. We would oftentimes look at the jails as a warehousing opportunity. You come here, you're there. If you want something, ask for it. If it's something we provide, we'll give it to you. Now we just offer a saturation of services. Every inmate coming through the jail before they leave is, I use the term of a high school guidance counselor.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yeah.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
What do you need? How can we help you get there? And before they walk out the back door, we try our best to connect them to services, if they're willing and accepting of those offerings. That's the best opportunity we have out of a custodial environment to tie them to post-release success so that we can keep them into stability, mental health stability, sobriety, into housing, whatever that might be. There's been iterations of this over time for decades, The [inaudible 00:11:51] Program, if you are familiar with that, Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction Grant, provided money for that a decade ago, but that money was taken away as we're just in the infancy of our program, which was designed to get those experiencing mental illness at a much less lower levels than we're experiencing today, into tie them to programs, post release. As a clinician, you know this.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yeah.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Mental illness is an evil disease and in treatment, it's cyclical. People get treatment. They may be on medications to stabilize them and they start to believe, "I'm okay. I don't need my medications anymore."
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
They stop taking medications, they decline and then it's a circular environment they oftentimes end up in. So to keep them into stability is key.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
And to have that continuum of care, right?
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Yes.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
To have a long-term plan and advocacy and a support system, but you can only do so much, at your level of intervention. You have to be able to let people go and hope for the best, but set them up for success as much as you can, but you can only do so much, I can imagine.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Yes but I'm in social work more than I am in law enforcement lately, when you look at some of the challenges that we've had, there's an obligation that you have. It's not just about incarcerating people and saying, "You're held accountable and you pay your debt to society and then get out."
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
And hope they don't come back. There is this opportunity, while you have them, to do everything you can. While I have them in jail, but I've looked beyond the walls of the jail now, I'm looking at it from a system, how are they getting here? What can we do to prevent? While I have them here, what can I do to get them into stability and sobriety, into programs, post release of reentry programming, post release where can we take you to, to do things? We've done some innovative things within our jail in just the last several years that I'm very proud of. COVID actually stopped a lot of our processes that we're going to implement that I'm really going to be excited about.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Tell us about those.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, for example, we have mental health issues, of course, and we're building out that program significantly within the substance use disorder and step down units, we are putting in place and we're building all this into place, but it has to be done beyond the walls. But even beyond that, and you have to have programs that will meet the needs of the individuals, to get them into stability once they get out of jail and that could be employment, it could be housing, it could be tied to insurance, Medi-Cal, Medicare.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
We have several initiatives, legislatively, we're trying to get passed that would allow us to use MHSA money, the Prop. 63 monies for those who are not sentenced, pre-custody individuals, or for programs in the jails that would be probably a good, legitimate use of those monies, and may even be the best return on those dollars investments, because that's where I have them right now, to get them into stability while they're here, to get them released, or vocational training. We're bringing back vocational training within the jails.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Love that.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That hasn't happened for decades, automotive maintenance, any type of programs we can do that will get people into employment opportunities, post-release. Prior to COVID, we had one of the strongest economies this country has seen in 50 years.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right, right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
We're in essence at full employment, what better way to get somebody into a great environment for success than trained on a skill set that they could leave, go into the working environment and be employed, with the prevailing wage and hopefully not have them come back?
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
So much of mental health, we talk a lot about this on the show about just the shame that accompanies mental health and with that shame comes a feeling of helplessness and I'm not worth anything, and so much of recovering from mental health or at least sending people on the right path is empowering them in lots of different ways. So giving them a skill, a trade, something that they can intentionally do, I mean, it's just one of the best ways you can empower somebody re-entering the world, the workforce.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Yeah. I get an opportunity to plug one of my favorite organizations, MECCA, which the Multi-ethnic Collaborative of Community Agencies, and you mentioned the stigma of mental health, and this is a group and I'm on the board for this organization and this is an organization aimed at alleviating or limiting the stigma of mental health. It deals with cultural issues. A lot of the cultures that are present in Orange County, it's a very broad based and all-inclusive county and many different cultures, has this cultural stigma associated with mental illness and to get them to move beyond that and realize that it is okay to recognize and address and move forward with that.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
I also have an interfaith council that we work with in the Sheriff's Department, all the different faith traditions in Orange County, we're going to be bringing back, I think it's targeted for August-October, where we're going to have a forum on mental illness and go to the faith traditions, all the different mosques, synagogues, temples, churches, gurdwaras and teach clergy and their staff, how to embrace the concept of treating those and accepting those with mental illness, to try to get these services back out through the religious system.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
It's all tied together, if you look at what happens and really what's sad about this, and it's not new to you, obviously, is a lot of the ways people end up in the criminal justice system and inside jail or prison could be stopped and prevented, if we have a more robust, preventative and intervention strategy on the front end to get people out of the criminal element of what they may be committing. If it's serious, obviously there has to be some accountability, but if it's minor violations and many of these are, to get them out of that and into a program or intervention for stability and get them out of the criminal justice system entirely.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yes and that is such a theme in mental health in general, is early intervention. In so many ways and it seems to come up from every walk of life interview that I've had, that if we just were able to address things earlier, catch things earlier, acknowledge that mental health just doesn't show up one day, it's something that has been growing. The seeds were planted a long time ago and let's just recognize signs earlier on, I mean, it's true, in general, of mental health, and when we're talking about preventing incarceration and the criminal justice system, yes, absolutely. What do you think we should be doing to help make that happen? What are we missing?
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, from a juvenile perspective, we have a program in the Sheriff's Department called Juvenile Diversion and it deals specifically, we have a team of our deputies and investigators that do nothing but address school-based issues and juvenile issues. We work with Pepperdine University with their clinicians to get kids who may be struggling, who may have unidentified issues into this program. It's a sliding scale. It's available at no cost or sliding scale and these clinicians will oftentimes address these children and get them back on their feet and back in a good place, which is important because the way the juvenile justice system works, for those who may not be aware, the juvenile justice system is based on correcting behavior in a non-punitive way. Getting them back in a place that's not based on punitive action.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
When they turn 18 and a day, they're now going into an adult system, which is based on punitive accountability and often has programs with it too, but one action they may be doing at 17 will be viewed as trying to correct their behavior in the juvenile system, where at 18, they end up getting booked into Orange County jail for the same activity and it's hard when the adult brain doesn't mature until 25, when you have these crimes, these actions that it's hard for a young person, who's struggling. Oftentimes if it's mental illness or some type of behavioral issue or substance use issue, will skew their decision-making in a way, that lands them in a bad place. Once they're in, it's hard to get back out. So I love that program. That's very important for us to get kids back on their feet, in a good place, with a supporting system, so they don't end up in the adult system. Every dollar we spend in the juvenile system on prevention saves us $7 in the end in the adult system over a lifetime.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Wow.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That's a huge cost savings for taxpayers to put money where it matters most in that system so I've really been big on juvenile correction and those programs to get kids back on their feet, without harming them over a lifetime.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Absolutely.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
The other part of that, for the adult system though, is equally as important. There's always been strategies in place through the collaborative courts, mental health court, Whatever It Takes court, and we've had this court system in place for a long time to get people back in a good place, veteran's court. We just opened a veterans unit in the jail two years ago.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Love that.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That is focused only on those who have served our country proudly and they have fallen short. The deputies who work there are also veterans so there's a connection with them to get them back on their feet. We're very proud of that program as well. The recidivism rate for that and in some programs nationally is 5%. So it's a huge success to have those types of programs, but that's just one example of many, but we really have to build this program out beyond this. We have the Integrated Services Plan inside Orange County, which is really the manifestation of this discussion over years. It's part of the COC or the Continuum of Care Strategy that we have in Orange County and it's all just built together. It's all intertwined, but we have to get the front end built out and we have to get the backend built out as well, for those experiencing homelessness, which oftentimes that's a mental health nexus, to have permanent supportive housing and shelter available throughout the county to deal with that population.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
I love that you continue to say that things are all connected because I think something that happens a lot in all kinds of treatment of all kinds of different things, but especially for mental illness, is that it's easy for people to get lost in the shuffle because everybody's operating in their own silo, at least in the world I come from, send you to this specialist or this specialist or this person, that works with this kind of disease or whatnot and there's very little integration, which is tough because human beings are complex and it's all connected. So to have everybody kind of operating from these separate camps, doesn't always serve the person very well.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
So on a more macro perspective from you, talking about the system, how important it is for everything to get or to be, to realize how interconnected everything really is, everything is related, that is what Be Well OC really is about, recognizing the connectedness between all of the community actions that we all have, all the organizations that we can all work together, because this is, the person, all their experiences are connected and as we respond to that, we all need to be connected and be sensitive to that and how that really does make a difference in helping them to have a relationship between it all.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Yeah, you mentioned, Be Well OC and Marshall Moncrief is a good friend and a lot of what we've done is really been the catalyst that ended, not ended yet, but began with, I should say, Be Well OC and there's a second campus coming online soon in South Orange County and I'm working with the CEO's office to see if we can, there's a lot of buildings at that location. I don't want to say where it is yet because they haven't announced but we want to get one of those buildings available for a post-custody re-entry facility for those who came through the criminal justice system to have somewhere to go after they've been released to get the services that they needed, that we gave them while they're inside the jail. So all of those are very important and for those who don't know, the Be Well Center is a very important strategy for us.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
It's a place for law enforcement to take people who are either in mental health crisis on a 5150 hold or a 5250 hold after that, or experiencing, it's a detox center. It has all these different service provisions that can get somebody back on their feet and a great alternative to the jail. Sometimes the jail is the alternative that's available, and it shouldn't be the only one. This is one alternative that will be made available, including all of the support systems that go with it. I'm very proud of the involvement that we've had on that. I'm on many boards, but some of the others I'm on is Commission to End Homelessness in Orange County and Housing Finance Trust, which is getting the money to build out the house, the housing system for homelessness as well. As you said, it's all interconnected.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yeah.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
What drives me crazy is, and what I refuse to tolerate to a degree are people that operate in silos or in self-preservation and that has been allowed to occur, over time, where people really see everybody else as competition and that's not the way things could work, especially in the CBO community-based organization and nonprofit world, we have to work laterally, side to side. I used the analogy once when somebody who was talking about that and I was talking about the fourth nonprofit on homelessness when I was dealing with the Riverbed a few years ago, and they were bringing to me what they could do, and I stopped them and I said, "Stop. You're telling me the same thing I've already heard and the problem is, you need to be working laterally with these other nonprofits," and what I told them was, if you remember the old Miracle on 34th Street movie, I said, I want the Macy's Santa.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
I want somebody to sit and say, "You have a problem, but I can't help you. You need to go over here to get the help that you need and connect everything together laterally." So we're triaging this person, as you said, at one time and getting a saturation of services around that person, we need to envelop them with the service offerings in a way that we're not doing an assembly line. We're dealing with everything that they're experiencing at the same time, because you can't just fix one part of 10 issues, you have to look at it holistically and make sure that they are being addressed as one person experiencing one thing, rather than all these disparate issues that sometimes we peel off.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Because they're people, and there's a system in place, but also is made up of individual people with their own traumas, with their own histories and you can, I am so realistic, you can only look at so much because there is a criminal justice system that has to run. But I'm curious about you specifically and your... Just in our last couple minutes that we have, the last few minutes, just your experience personally, in working with us, because you've said a couple of times that you feel like you're a social worker more than not, a lot of the times, and has your view, feeling, opinions about the person struggling with mental illness that are maybe repeat offenders or whatnot, your relationship to them, your thoughts about them, has it changed over time? Do you have a different perspective about it? How has it impacted you, I guess?
Sheriff Don Barnes:
I think it, I don't want to say I've changed over time. I think I've become maybe frustrated over time with some of the things that we experience and I'm not picking or assessing blame on anybody, but when you get to this point in your career, the worst thing that you can do is look back over 30 years at opportunities missed. When I was a young deputy working the jail, I oftentimes worked in the mental health section of the jail, so I saw people coming in, who oftentimes are struggling with decision-making and hard to hold them accountable when you know that they are not 100% control of the decisions they're making. It's the safest way I can say, describe somebody in that environment.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
And that's well said, yeah.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
So you have to work with them, develop trust and then when you go through a career, you have other opportunities out in the environment in patrol, or as a field training officer, and then as an executive, a manager, and all these opportunities came up. We just implemented a full behavioral health bureau within the Orange County Sheriff's department, twice. Once inside the jail and once inside the community that we're serving because as I said, you can't just go out and have a homeless liaison officer because homelessness is not the only thing impacting that individual. There are many other factors that got them there. I use the term that I love when I try to explain this to people, which is complex. Simple problems are easy, two plus two equals four and then you have complicated issues, baking the cake for the first time is complicated, and then becomes routine. Complex is many other variables that come in and they change, there's a dynamic of not one person is the same as the next and you have to peel that layer back and figure out what is driving that individual.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
So to your question, why I am the way I am, it just bothers me that we've gotten to this place, not only in Orange County, but as a society where people are falling off. They're falling, you walk right by them, and they're not seen as people anymore. They're just somebody who is down on their luck or whatever it may be and I think we have an obligation to band together as a community, as in one community, not the white community, Latino community, the LGBT community, the black community, or based on religion or whatever it might be. We have to come together as one community and use this synergy to start treating people who need a hand up, not a handout, a hand up, we need to help lift them up.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
What I found through this and what we've seen through all of our endeavors in the jail and I've gotten tremendous feedback, positive feedback from families and also inmates who were in our custody, that their words, not mine, "I feel like I was valued." I've had letters written to me about deputies, "I want to thank this deputy because they treated me this way and offered these services and I feel like I'm on a good path for the first time in many years."
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Wow.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
There's a complex solution in there though. It takes the person, the individual, to buy into their own safety and their own future as well and that's not oftentimes easy. Sometimes people are too far gone. They want nothing to do with help. Sometimes you can break through that and they take service offerings and buy in and the best result, if any, is when somebody says, "Thank you, you saved my life," because I'm now back in a better place and those stories do exist as well, but it takes a village.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
It does. Oh.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Sorry about that.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
That's okay. It does take a village and it's... One thing that when you're talking, it makes me feel very hopeful because it, one of the things, when you say people have to buy into their own recovery, I worked for a very long time with substance abuse disorders and mental health is all intertwined with that so anything and everything that falls under that umbrella and to buy into their own recovery, they have to trust you. There has to be trust and there has to be safety and what creates that? It doesn't happen right overnight and it's different for all different types of people, pasts and personalities and everything but it sounds like the compassion is there, I can see it and feel it, in talking to you that there is a real intention and a compassion and a heart for this work, and that's something that can be felt. You don't really even need to say it and that I can imagine helps with the cause of instilling trust and buying into their own recovery.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
That, but it also takes an investment.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Sure.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
I think the other half of this equation is having the right people doing the work.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yeah.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
But then also having the resources to be able to do this.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Right.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
This past year was tough on law enforcement nationally and there was a big movement to defund the police and I've told people it's not defunding the police, it's funding the appropriate programs that get the police out of these interactions with the public in crisis that needs to take place. I'm all in that endeavor. We've been advocating for that, for funding for those types of programs so that we don't have to do that part of our job anymore, which I think is very important, but that's going to take time because the system has to be built out, as I said, we're building from the middle backwards, but over time we can start removing ourself from these issues that are being relied upon for law enforcement to respond to and have clinicians, or perhaps even be so far deep into it that before mental health even manifests into being serious, it's being treated, prevented and on the front end, that we'll never even see it in the criminal justice system.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
You have to walk a fine line, don't you? You have got one foot in having compassion and the social work kind of aspect of your work and then the other side is you got to hold the line.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, and that's tough, and through my career, I've taken many people to jail on the simple premise of I'm saving you from yourself, and if you don't have that mindset, you can't do this job to be punitive. You have to remember, if you asked anybody in law enforcement, what they said in their interview, why they want to be a peace officer, I guarantee you, every one of them said something along the line of, "I want to help people. I want to give back. I want to serve my community," and that's important to keep that tucked away, that it brings back as reminder that I'm here to help you, whoever that might be in that moment. The average person has one, maybe two law enforcement contacts in a lifetime. We have to make sure that we take every advantage of every opportunity to make sure that person's needs are met in whatever we can.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
But for me, the best way to meet the needs of those experiencing these social issues is to get us out of that environment entirely. So they're being met by the professionals who know how to do this much better than we do. This has been something we've been kind of dragged into this environment because there hasn't been anybody there. It's not been robust enough to treat those who are in crisis and if we can build that system out and get everybody, these people that come through are a significant number of people who are in crisis, that cycle through the revolving door of my jail and they're not here long enough for me to get into stability, and I'm not saying they should stay longer. They shouldn't come at all and if we can get that system in place and build it out, be preventative and treat their needs better, everybody wins.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Everybody wins. And it sounds like you are really pushing and leading an intentional paradigm shift in the world of law enforcement and its relationship to mental health and mental illness and I think that is, needed, is not even a good enough word, it's necessary.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
It is absolutely necessary.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Yeah. Yeah, and so grateful for all that you do and the heart that you have for it, it's refreshing and I appreciate it so much, so thank you.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Thank you.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
I wanted to work with the criminal justice system when I was a baby therapist, when I was in school. I wanted to work in the jails. I wanted to be on the front lines and my professor pulled me aside and he said, "Nope, you are way too sensitive. You cannot do it. They'll all think that you're mom and you won't be able to handle it," and I thought, "Well, maybe you're right."
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Well, you have to have a certain amount of sensitivity. You're working with people so you have to be sensitive to it.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Sheriff Barnes, thank you so much for being with us today, for all you do, I know your schedule is very busy, so thank you for making the time.
Sheriff Don Barnes:
Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
Kate Gosney-Hoffman:
Absolutely. All right.