North Carolina Expands Supervision for Mentally Ill Probationers
by Anthony W. Accurso
By the end of 2024, North Carolina’s Division of Community Supervision (DCS) will expand its Specialty Mental Health Probation (SMHP) to 56 of the state’s 100 counties. Employing 78 specially trained probation officers and 58 chief probation officers, SMHP represents the state’s attempt to confront the fact that mental illness is overrepresented in the population on probation.
A survey of 41 state probation departments released by the University of North Carolina (UNC) in partnership with Pew Charitable Trusts on January 10, 2024, found a disturbing lack of training and tools for officers to properly address probationers with mental health challenges. Responding agencies acknowledged that 20-25% of those under supervision had mental health issues, but just 41% of probation departments reported having a specialized mental health approach. When limited to agencies in rural counties, the share dropped to 26%.
Worse, probation officers in a whopping 42% of agencies are not required to undergo any mental health training, and even those that do get just three days or less. That makes it perversely appropriate that less than 25% of departments grant officers discretion in setting probation conditions or violations for those on their caseloads who are mentally ill. See: Adults With Mental Illness Are Overrepresented in Probation Population, Pew (January 10, 2024).
The risk of arrest doubles when there is mental illness present, spiking by a factor of 12 with co-occurring disorders. This leaves approximately 830,000 mentally ill Americans on probation, or nearly a quarter of all those on supervision. What North Carolina has attempted with SMHP is a reduction in caseloads for probation officers trained for and assigned to mentally ill probationers.
Duplin County officer Jason Szybka sees 40 of them now, versus 75 before assignment to SMHP. But there aren’t enough like him. North Carolina keeps 76,000 residents under supervision, and the quarter who are mentally ill represents 19,000 probationers. They in turn need 475 officers like Szybka, three-and-a-half times as many as SMHP now employs. As one unnamed officer admitted to UNC/Pew researchers, “I think we don’t always understand what’s going on with them, because we don’t have the time to have those conversations. When you’ve got 120, 130 on your caseload, your goal is compliance.”
Additional source: North Carolina Health News
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