Yakima County Jail to House Mentally Ill Inmates

YAKIMA, Wash. — After sitting empty for almost five years, the Yakima County jail in March will start housing inmates being treated for mental illness.

In December, Yakima County commissioners approved a $475,000 annual contract with Central Washington Comprehensive Mental Health, a nonprofit that offers behavioral health and substance-use disorder treatment services, to house inmates whose trials are pending as they undergo mental health treatment, reported Yakima Herald-Republic.

This contract is the first step that county officials have made to put the minimum-security facility to use since it closed in late 2010. The jail was built in 2006 to house inmates under contract from other communities, but authorities had to close the facility after losing several inmate contracts worth millions of dollars. The county will continue to pay off construction debt for the empty jail — which costs about $2 million a year, according to KIMA TV — until it expires in 2022, unless the jail can serve some other purpose.

Comprehensive Mental Health and its roughly 40 staff members will occupy one of the jail’s four pods to work with inmates, while the Yakima County Department of Corrections will supply two correctional officers to operate the pod’s control room and provide security. In total, the jail comprises four pods, each of which can house up to 72 inmates for a total of 288 beds, according to Yakima Herald-Public.

To oversee the pretrial inmates as patients, Comprehensive Mental Health secured an approximately $2.2 million annual contract with the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. The nonprofit will help the state meet the needs of a federal judge’s ruling, which requires the state to quickly deal with a backlog of suspects who need competency evaluations and restoration treatment, according to Yakima Herald-Public. Comprehensive’s contract with the state will expire at the end of 2016, with the option of renewing for another year.

Before inmates can be moved to the facility, it will need some remodeling such as constructing partitions to divide large bays into smaller treatment-like quarters. Construction includes about 20 improvements to the site, which Comprehensive Mental Health is paying for from state funding, reported KIMA TV.

Tim Hunter, state hospital forensic policy and legislative administrator, told Yakima Herald-Public that state hospitals have seen an 8 to 10 percent increase in the number of cases that need pretrial mental health services, which has caused a demand for 90 additional beds statewide. In addition to the Yakima County jail contract, the state is also working to establish a 30-bed contract at Maple Lane School near Rochester, another vacant facility that most recently served as a juvenile rehabilitation facility for boys, and another 30-bed contract at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake.

Yakima County Department of Corrections Director Ed Campbell told Yakima Herald-Public that he is also working on securing more similar contracts at the Yakima County jail to make the facility fully operational again.