CLAYTON — Eric Handley sauntered to the back of the courtroom and thrust his fist into the air, unleashing a year of frustration.
“He’s out!” Handley exclaimed.
Handley’s son, Jason, had been locked up in the St. Louis County Jail, the victim of a broken mental health system in Missouri. Last February, after two psychiatric examinations found Jason unfit to stand trial because of a mental disability, a judge committed him to the care of the Department of Mental Health.
Judges across the state make such determinations nearly every day. But there’s a problem. The Department of Mental Health doesn’t have the beds or capacity for the people that judges are sending for treatment. So people like Jason Handley waste away in jail for weeks, or months or more than a year. Their conditions worsen as they sit behind bars, even though their criminal cases are in a state of suspension.
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Jason’s attorneys, Rick Sindel and Jordan Wellinghoff, found a work-around. They went to probate court to have Eric Handley named as his son’s guardian. The probate judge found Jason was “totally incapacitated” and “legally disabled.”
The attorneys then filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against Jason; he was charged with “making a terroristic threat” in 2023 after he called himself a “school shooter” in a social media post.
On Thursday, Circuit Court Judge Richard Stewart called Eric Handley to the bench to have a conversation about his son.
“I have no guns in my home,” Handley, a 24-year Army veteran who retired as a major, told the judge. “I give you my word.”
The judge dismissed the charges. Jason was released later that day.
One down, 440 to go. That’s the number of people in Missouri who, like Jason Handley, have a judge’s order for treatment but are stuck in a city or county lockup. They are men and women in limbo, not really facing criminal charges anymore but also not getting the treatment they need.
It’s a tragedy that makes us all less safe. Jails aren’t equipped to treat them, and taking care of so many mentally ill people causes disruptions and negative impacts for everyone involved.
“We’re not a mental health facility,” Maj. Tammy Grimes, the jail superintendent in St. Clair County, told me nearly two years ago. “We can’t provide them the health care that the court is ordering them to receive.”
In Illinois, where Grimes works, the problem is so bad that sheriffs sued the state to try to force action. Missouri last year announced a pilot project to offer mental treatment and evaluation in jails, but it’s been slow to develop. Of the hundreds of people in jail waiting for a mental health bed, only 16 are participating in pilot programs intended to restore mental competency so they can face the charges against them.
Meanwhile, the problem only worsens. The number of people in Jason Handley’s situation — stuck in urban and rural jails, awaiting help — increased by more than 100 during his time behind bars.
“It’s been a hell of a process,” Eric Handley told me.
He worried about his son committing suicide, getting attacked by another inmate or “becoming lost in the system.”
Finally, at about 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jason Handley was released into the custody of his father. They headed home to Florissant. Jason enjoyed Imo’s Pizza, Taco Bell and some coffee on his first evening of freedom in more than a year.
His dad plans to get him back into mental health treatment, meeting regularly with a counselor, as Jason had done before his arrest.
Jason’s grandmother, Louisa Thompson, still worries about the people left behind in the St. Louis County Jail and other lockups across the state.
“This whole process was horrible,” she told me. “He needed treatment, not jail.”
Beauty student and inmate Michelle Lam talks about the benefits of the new beauty school training at the St. Louis County Justice Center in Clayton. Lam is one of four female inmates who will graduate later month from the jail’s inaugural program.
