Nearly 500 Missourians in jail waiting for beds with Department of Mental Health
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Five hundred people in Missouri jails have been deemed incompetent to stand trial and are waiting for a bed with the Department of Mental Health. But there are no beds available.
The state has 922 beds available for criminal commitment, or committing someone to mental health treatment while they await trial. Jeanette Simmons, deputy director for the Department of Mental Health, says the wait for a bed right now is about 14 months.
Around 200 people are waiting to be evaluated at a state-run facility, according to Simmons. This evaluation will determine whether a person is mentally fit to help with the legal process of their case. The state has 30 days to fulfill that request from the court, but can ask for an extension.
"When you have a finite number of beds and an increasing number of referrals, you end up with a backlog," said Simmons.
This number has continued to climb throughout the years. According to previous reporting, in November 2023, 297 people in Missouri jails were waiting on a mental health evaluation ahead of trial.
So far this year, the department has completed nearly 1,200 pretrial evaluations. In 2024, the department conducted 972 evaluations.
"More evaluations are being ordered, and as such, more individuals are being found incompetent to stand trial," said Simmons. "The thing that hasn't changed for the department is the number of beds available for individuals to be restored."
When a person is deemed incompetent to stand trial, they are technically in the custody of DMH to receive treatment and therapy, but due to the backlog, they sit waiting in jail.
"We hope for less, but it's not unheard of for months and months and months for this process to take to get somebody into the Department of Mental Health," said Capt. Brian Leer with the Boone County Sheriff's Office.
Many Mid-Missouri jails are housing inmates in DMH custody. The Boone County Jail is housing 20 detainees waiting for beds and eight detainees waiting for evaluations.
"We had a detainee that first came into our facility in 2021, and it was in the last two weeks that they went to the Department of Mental Health for a bed, now, during that process, they went to the Department of Mental Health once," said Leer. "And just two weeks ago, went back to the Department of Mental Health, and we're talking from early 2021 till fall of 2025, and this person's case is still not disposed of."
It is not uncommon that a detainee is sent to DMH for treatment, comes back to jail and starts to decline. In many instances, the person refuses medication and the jail cannot force them to take it.
"They may not be able to take care of themselves and they're going to have to be supervised or monitored with to make sure that they're taking their medications, otherwise they fall into that cycle of coming off of medications degrading into psychosis, criminal justice issues arise, ending up in secure facility, bouncing in and out, back and forth and not really addressing the issues," said Melissa Buchanan, first assistant prosecutor for Boone County.
In Columbia, the lawyer for Emma Adams, the woman accused of killing a University of Missouri student and trying to burn his body in 2023, filed a motion multiple times to have her committed. Adams was committed to the DMH in November 2023, and was found unfit to stand trial in January.
According to online court records, Sept. 25 was the deadline for DMH to give her evaluation report to the court. Her next court hearing is Oct. 14.
By the time of her next hearing, it will have been a few months shy of three years since the killing took place.
Tune in Wednesday at 10 p.m. on KMIZ to watch the in-depth report on mental illness in jails.
