Mesa County and the Sheriff’s Office are making a major effort to address mental and behavioral health at the Mesa County Detention Center, as part of Mesa County’s efforts to deal with mental and behavioral health issues within the community as a whole.

This is a smart area to address early on in this effort for a number of reasons, chief among them that ensuring inmates’ mental health is addressed will help them to be successful once they leave the jail, reducing the chance they reoffend and reducing crime in the county as a whole. It is also much less expensive to keep them out of the criminal justice system in the first place.

We should say that people with mental health issues in general aren’t likely to commit crimes or be violent. That’s a stigma that remains on people suffering with these conditions. Nonetheless, as Mesa County Sheriff Todd Rowell points out, there are still many inmates that do have mental health conditions that need treatment.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve recognized that close to 50% of our inmates are on anti-psychotics,” Rowell said in an interview with The Daily Sentinel’s Charles Ashby. “I want to see people treated with their appropriate level of care, and for the majority of those inmates, our jail is not the appropriate level of care.”

One of the main tools the detention center has in place is Jail Based Behavioral Services, which provides a series of programs to help inmates with substance abuse, competency enhancement and medication assistance. This is necessary to keep the jail safe for both the inmates and the jail staff.

The jail has also implemented a relatively new transition program designed to help soon-to-be released inmates get the things they may need to succeed so the jail doesn’t become a revolving door for them. Until recently, the jail employed one person to handle those duties, but recently added a second.

We see this as a critical piece for this community. Too often inmates can enter a cycle where they are jailed, released, reoffend, are jailed again and on and on it continues.

“We have this robust system to get them stabilized, but one of the things that we recognized was that when they walk out of our doors, there’s nobody to catch them,” Rowell said. “They’re out on the curb calling the last person they knew, and they end up back with the same people that got them in trouble in the first place.”

Adding resources to break that cycle makes all the sense in the world to us. Disrupting this ecosystem that just feeds people back into the criminal justice system is the only way to help people get their lives back in order.

It can sometimes be hard to understand why we should help people currently in prison. These are criminals right? They are there to pay their debt to society, but we’re glad the sheriff and county commissioners see that there is more to the equation than just punishment.

By treating mental and behavioral health issues and helping inmates get ready to reenter society, we can deliver benefits to the entire community.

If they can help these people stabilize their lives, get out of the situation where they committed their crime and become people who contribute to our community, it benefits everyone. It is cheaper and more humane to help them not reoffend than to continue the cycle of crime and punishment.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel editorial board