On this episode, we spoke with three people involved in efforts to reform the process used to determine a defendant's mental competency. In the U.S. legal system, an accused person must be able to understand the charges against them and assist their lawyer in preparing a defense. In practice, such defendants often spend long periods in confinement because of a shortage of behavioral health services.
A core tenet of the U.S. legal system is that an accused person must be competent to stand trial, which means a defendant can understand the charges against them and assist their lawyer in preparing a defense. In practice, defendants who need to be evaluated for competency often spend long periods in confinement because of a shortage of behavioral health services. When they are finally released, it's usually without ongoing care.
On this episode, we spoke with three people who are involved in efforts to reform the process used to determine a defendant's mental competency: Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush and two Colorado legislators, Senator Judy Amabile, a Democrat, and Senator Byron Pelton, a Republican.
Chief Justice Rush explained the dimensions of the problem and discussed how a national task force on the issue developed. Policy recommendations. Senator Amabile, who has sponsored legislation on the issue talked about how Colorado ended up with a significant backlog of cases. Senator Pelton explained some of the unique challenges people in rural America face when dealing with behavioral health issues.
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Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
LR: And when you look at the state court system and I’m going to speak mainly to that. 98.5% of the cases in the country are in the state courts. What are these cases about and what you see is that we have become the sort of defacto behavioral health resource.
Ed: That was Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush, one of my guests on this podcast. She is joined by two Colorado legislators, Senator Judy Amabile, a Democrat, and Senator Byron Pelton, a Republican. All three are involved in efforts to reform the process used in determining a defendant’s mental competency to stand trial and address the need for more behavioral health services.
Competency to stand trial means a defendant can understand the charges against them and assist their lawyer in preparing a defense. In practice, defendants who need to be evaluated for competency often spend long periods in confinement because of a shortage of behavioral health services. When they are finally released, it is usually without ongoing care.
Chief Justice Rush explained the dimensions of the problem and discussed how a national task force on the issue developed policy recommendations. Senator Amabile, who has sponsored legislation on the issue, talked about how Colorado ended up with a significant backlog of cases. Senator Pelton explained some of the unique challenges people in rural America face when dealing with behavioral health issues.
Here is our discussion starting with Chief Justice Rush.
Chief Justice Rush, thanks for coming on the podcast.
LR: Thanks for having me.
Ed: So now, in your role, you have a lot of different areas of policy that you have to contend with and I wonder if you could tell the listeners how you came to champion competency to stand trial issues both nationally and in Indiana, why that’s important to you.
LR: It’s a bigger issue. It’s really dealing with behavioral health issues in the courts and competency is a subset of that. I’ve been an attorney and a judge for 42 years. I’ve been the chief justice, now I’m in my 11th year. And I’ve been president of the Conference of Chief Justices. And when you look at the state court system, and I’m going to speak mainly to that--98.5% of the cases in the country are in the state courts. What are these cases about and what you see is that we have become the sort of defacto behavioral health resource, referral source. Judges and lawyers, we don’t go to law school knowing about best practices and substance abuse or behavioral health. That really impacted myself. I was a trial court judge, a juvenile court judge for 13 years before I went on the Supreme Court so you really got to see … what happens when our criminal justice system, child welfare system are so impacted by the behavioral health needs of those that are before us. How do we work within our communities to divert people that are seriously mentally ill or suffer from substance abuse disorder to find a better path for them to break that generational cycle that we see so often in our communities.
The realities are when we deinstitutionalized people from mental health placements years ago, jails became the defacto mental health. When you look at who is in our jail, 70% of people are in jail right now across the country have substance abuse, mental health or co-disorder. And if you talk to a judge, they are going to tell you they know the how big are your community, they know the people that are cycling through. They get arrested. There is a crisis in their jail. They get out. There is a crisis it takes law enforcement time. It’s expensive. It’s bad for them. There has got to be a better way. So, we did the same thing national taskforce to examine state courts response to mental health and we actually had legislators on and I know this group is this podcast is dealing with that and we really looked at a model for Indiana, we had a summit where we had every had every judge from all 92 counties bring a team down. It might be either a mayor, their community health provider, prosecutor or public defender to come up with a plan within the community. What are the resources you have. What are the resources you need. What are better ways of dealing and diverting. We did it nationally and we did it in five states. So, I chaired the second one and then realized there are better ways and better practices. You know, you meet somebody like a Judge Leifman down in Florida dealing with mental health and you realize that there is a better way.
The competency is one of the many recommendations so the mental health taskforce you know one of the things we do is we got to change the competency to stand trial. It’s inhumane for some maybe a misdemeanor that sits in jail for six months because they can’t get an allotment slot and then if they have to go to get evaluated, they are in a state hospital. And by the time the charges come around, they are dropped because time served. Last year alone in Indiana 14% increase in referrals just for competency. That is a lot when you look at each one of those is going to tie up some of our … resources to get that done so how long is the average wait time to get a bed. How long is that. And then it’s just the great cost and the final thing is the training we train every judge in our state on best practices for substance abuse and mental health. We have some judges that do … crisis intervention training because they are dealing with those crises in the court and it really causes judges to work with the community partners cause. It’s a trick we have. When judges call a meeting, people show up. So, if you want to deal with mental health in your community and you want to convene it and obviously you have a superpower, people will show up. And it’s led to a lot of good conversations and we’ve just made a lot of forward moving benefits from it.
TM: 6:03
Ed: Well, I was a newspaper reporter in California covering criminal courts in the early 1980’s and I have to say that the situation sounds much like it was then. I read through the taskforce report including the policy recommendations and it was much more than just the issue of competency, the issue you have alluded to. And I wonder if you can talk why that broader approach was so important.
JA: Because competency somebody is you know they are knee deep in the criminal justice system right. They’ve been arrested. It’s there. So, we started like let’s move upstream a little bit and how do we deflect from even coming. What are the resources and that’s where 988 is so powerful and we could use that. So just like you call 911 you call 988 and you have someone to call, someone to answer and somewhere to go so that they are not just going to jail untreated only to cycle again. So, we looked at that and we also looked at who we need to have at the table in our community. Certain community collaboration. So, a person-centered justice. So, competency is a piece but then working within and then what how should we train our judges and what’s best practices for educating them. And then our other stakeholders because probation is often under the courts educating prosectors. Ahm behavioral health and equity that was a big underline current throughout. And then how do you deal with people who sort of voices appears. Individuals with limited experience. Who we are finding very effective is sort of peer-based supports. We do it with veteran’s courts in Indiana, which often are about substance abuse and mental health. We have a veteran walk along with that veteran through the sort of intensive court involvement and rehabilitation and its effective. Courts don’t normally do that right. I mean it is not something that we are used to. And then really dealing with children from different families. The family unit as a whole with a behavioral health issue. So those are the areas that we have recommendations on beyond the competency.
Ed: Well, that peer-to-peer approach I think I’ve done a number of podcasts about in different contexts about how successful that approach has been so that’s very interesting. You mentioned legislation and as I understand it this has come up in the last several legislative sessions in Indiana and can you talk about that a little bit.
LR: We started down this path in looking at mental health, we also brought in legislators to do the training we did as a judiciary which was very helpful because I would always tell legislators get with the judges and do this together in a partnership because it’s a beautiful partnership that works really well. We wanted to allow behavioral health practitioners to be able to do evaluations with a certification in psychiatric health. We wanted to not have to have two separate ones. We wanted to ease some of the regulations. We also developed a bill that allowed a judge to dismiss a misdemeanor and level 6 felony charges if there is a diagnosis of dementia, Alzheimer’s, traumatic brain injury where competency will never be restored. I hired an in house and I think we have eleven states in our country that have a behavioral health specialist right on site to make sure we are using services that are appropriate. When you think about all the services, we have to order whether it is a child welfare case, a criminal case, a guardianship case, we’ve learned that you’ve got to make sure that they are evidence based. You know I think about being a juvenile judge post Columbine where everybody locked up, let’s get tough on crime. Let’s lock everybody up. Let’s show them. They’ll turnaround. Those didn’t work. I mean they’ve been studied now and scared straight has the opposite effect. You put a low-risk offender in scared straight and they are going to be worse. So, we created a new health office who is very much up and running. We also created the behavioral health committee of judges statewide in regard to best practices and they continue to do trainings.
TM: 9:55
Ed: So, Indiana and a few other states are really kind of at the forefront of these efforts and it’s a tremendously complex area and I wonder for legislators, for people in the judiciary in other states, what single piece of advice would you offer them if they try to tackle this subject.
LR: So judicial branch leaders first off you know when you look at the financial costs of the behavioral health crisis that we are seeing with regard to workforce development, child abuse and neglect, elder abuse. When we had our mental health summits, we had the governor there. We had the speaker of the house present pro-terms, we had the leaders from all three branches of government together saying we are going to tackle this together. And you know one of the pieces we can play I can’t manufacture funding in the judicial branch. I can manufacture public trust and I will tell you, the National Center for State Courts did a survey like on public trust and confidence. You will hear its waiving a lot of our governmental mental institutions and put into the court, but they really drove it down. Where does the public in general so pretty vaguely courts should be doing better on meeting the behavioral health needs of those people that come before them. It’s not just a matter of just lock them up. We can only build so many jails. In Indiana, we have 111,000 kids that have an incarcerated parent on any given time. What can we do to break again a generational cycle. We had an outside agency, Temple University, did an independent study there they were and 93% were not rearrested that were in those courts. We’ve got to do better on the data. So, we tell the legislature work with us on the data. Work with giving your courts some tools. You know the work we are doing is a lot of common-sense work and intervention and working within the providers we have in our community so we are not inventing wheels, inventing new wheels, but we are also partnering with getting good treatment with a course of a better intervention of court. You know sometimes people aren’t ready. I mean you know I have a lot of people in my court that just were not ready to get clean. But you also need to understand the stigma of mental health, the stigma of addiction and maybe just train judges how to use it. Are you an addict or are you someone with a substance abuse disorder. Tell me a family that doesn’t have some mental health going on. It just doesn’t exist. I think getting courts to treat people individually that are coming before them is really important but also treat them with dignity.
Ed: Well Chief Justice, I think that so many people are aware of mental health issues these days. Maybe a lot more than we had in the past and it’s certainly becoming more of a subject people will talk about so it sounds like you are doing great work there and I thank you very much for explaining this and take care.
LR: Well, thank you for covering it. I appreciate it. You did a great job on your questions. Thank you.
Ed: I’ll be right back after this short break with Senator Judy Amabile.
TM: 13:06
Senator, welcome to the podcast.
JA: Thanks for having me.
Ed: Senator, earlier in the podcast, I spoke with Indiana Supreme Court Justice Loretta Rush. She discussed the national context about competency to stand trial and explained how it connects to the broader issue of behavioral health for people who become in the justice system. Colorado is one of more than a dozen states that have been sued because of competency delays. Can you talk a little bit about why competency is an issue in Colorado and why the state was sued.
JA: Well okay. That’s a big question. And I’m not sure if you are asking why do we have a bigger competency problem than other states or why is it a problem if you are in competent to proceed. But I can answer both of those questions.
Ed: Why don’t you start by talking about why Colorado was sued and whether it is because of a genuine problem or some other reason.
JA: So, before the pandemic is when the lawsuit happened. So, a lot of people have been complaining oh well it’s because of the pandemic and it’s not. We got sued before the pandemic. We had I don’t remember exactly what the number was, but you know some 200 and something people who were in jail who were in jail for longer than what is constitutionally allowed on whatever their charge was and deemed incompetent to proceed and then not being gotten to a facility where they could be helped. And by helped, I mean made competent to proceed. The lawsuit happened. They were working away at getting this waitlist down and then covid happened and all that progress evaporated and things really did get worse. So, when I started in the legislature, there were 350 people on the waitlist. In the time that I have been there it had gone up to 450 people on the waitlist. And then we put a whole bunch of money into what was called surge beds. So, we contracted with private hospitals to take competency patients and do competency restoration and we also did a lot more outpatient restoration and really worked to try to get the competency list down. So, it went from 450 down to I think maybe 250, but that’s all we did. And so now the competency list is back. It’s back to I think around 350. I don’t know what the number is today and my personal view of why this is happening and why it’s particularly bad in Colorado is that competency restoration is not treatment for your underlying mental illness. Competency restoration is in Colorado and probably other places we use a workbook and when you can complete the workbook and pair it back the answers to the questions then you are deemed competent to proceed. And that has nothing to do with whether you are still actively psychotic. Whether you are on some kind of you know medication that isn’t addressing your mental health issues but is maybe just coming you down and making you more able to sit through a session with a workbook. But whatever that is, we make people competent and then when adjudicate their case and then we let them go with no further action and that’s what we are seeing here in Colorado. And I listen to a really interesting podcast called The Churn. It is out of Washington and we have that here and I think that is a really good word because it isn’t good to be in this churn and it is really punishing for people. And so, until and unless we decide that we are going to actually treat people’s illness in a way that is actually helps them to recover, we are not going to solve the problem.
Ed: You’ve sponsored several bills to change the way the competency system works in Colorado. Can you talk about some of those actions to change the system and reduce how often it needs to be used.
JA: So, one of the big efforts is to try to get people once their case is adjudicated get them into the civil system providing a pathway to a short-term commitment without having to be forced on a M1 hold – a three-day hold. And then the other thing is we need more care. One of the pieces of legislation that I was really you know had my whole heart and soul in was putting some of the ARCO funds into building beds. So, they are being built now. There are 165 beds I believe that are either open or are opening that are transitional. They are called transitional living homes and they are taking people from Pueblo to hospitals the forensic hospital in Colorado and moving them into these transitional living homes. And then the idea is you get your feet under you at the transitional living home. You get help. You get a job. You begin your life and then maybe you can transition to the next level of care. I think that’s working and it’s helpful, but it isn’t enough because one the big pieces we are missing is we don’t have enough hospital beds. So, if you are not currently in the forensics system, there’s nowhere for you to go where you can stay for a longer length of time. We have the hospital at Ft. Logan. It has on a good day 95 beds. And we did ask for more beds, civil beds at Ft. Logan, but the deal we struck was you can use those for competency until we get the waitlist to go away and then we will turn them into civil commitment beds. And of course, in retrospect, that was backward because we need more civil commitment in order to stop more people from falling into the competency system.
So, the other thing we did was the state got a voucher or a, it’s not called a voucher. It’s a …
Ed: Yes, a waiver.
JA: A waiver. Thank you. We got a waiver that says right now in Colorado if you are in a hospital for more than 15 days, the hospital doesn’t get paid for any of your stay. If you are in three different hospitals in one month, nobody gets paid for any of it if your total is longer than 15 days. So, we applied for and got this waiver that says you can stay up to 60 days and the hospital will get paid. Implemented the waiver and we said if you are on short term hold, you have to be evaluated for a short-term commitment. Hopefully that will happen and these hospitals will now they see okay I can get paid. It will actually be more profitable if I keep the same patient for longer because I’m going to get paid the same amount per day and I won’t have the whole intake and the whole you know discharge thing. Certainly, we don’t want to have the reverse problem where people who don’t need to be in a hospital are being held against their will, but I think from where I’m sitting is that we are not keeping anywhere near long enough. We changed the statute it said you may evaluate them for a short-term commitment to you have to. You must evaluate them for a short-term commitment. And we will see. That bill just got passed and we will see if that begins to make a difference. We have a lot of private mental health hospitals in this state and I think that it must be profitable because there’s been a lot of consolidation in a lot of private equity that’s getting involved in that. And I think normally my team would say oh we hate profit, but if treating people with serious mental illness was super profitable then a lot more people would do it. And that would be useful. So, I’m not against that. I generally think we need a public system that’s super effective, but we are in this hybrid world here in Colorado and we don’t have enough public beds so if we can somehow leverage these private beds and get them to do a better job of helping people get into recovery then that seems like an okay way to go.
Ed: Most of the bills you have sponsored have had bipartisan sponsorship or support. Can you talk about the importance of working across the aisle to get this work done?
TM: 22:33
JA: It isn’t a Democrat-Republican, it’s not an ideological issue. It is about are we doing a good job of taking care of people or are we not. Are we filling up our jails with people who really shouldn’t be there or are we coming up with a better way. Are we seeing an explosion of homelessness and human suffering on our streets every day or do we not want that. So, on the bill to put money into these beds, my coprime sponsor on that I was in the House at the time, he was one of the most right winging republicans out there, but he literally went down and made the best speech I’ve heard on this topic and it was about I don’t want to step over bodies. I want us to fix a very broken thing. And I know in rural Colorado they really struggle to find placements for people, to transport people to where they need to go to get help and their jails are tiny and full and their sheriffs, no sheriffs really none of the sheriffs want to be in this place where they are the number one provider of mental health services in the state. But particularly in rural places where they don’t have access to medical teams and psychiatry and all of that, it’s even more important.
Ed: I’m sure this is an issue that is being looked at by legislators across the country. What advice would you share with your colleagues across the nation if they tackled this issue.
JA: I’ve been really lucky to have people who have helped me with bills that I’ve run from disability law to the public defenders to the district attorneys, the hospital association and then the government agencies that are involved. It isn’t the kind of thing where you just come up with an idea and then try to ram it through. That I don’t think that works because if you are successful in getting it passed, it’s not going to be implemented. If people are telling you, we can’t do this then I think you have to hear that and then you have to figure out what can you do. And I am frustrated by how incremental it’s been, but I also I get that this is how it goes so yes, you change the rules around and one holds transportation holds, short term commitment. You make some modest changes to that then you’ve got to get more ability to pay at these hospitals and then you’ve got to a make sure that the hospital is actually used the ability that they have to put people on short term certification. You know so you have to build it brick by brick. And then there’s often pushback. I passed a bill last year about youth who are incompetent and the laid out when who has what custody and what they can do in terms of the one thing they came up with in terms of assessments. And there was a case this year and the Supreme Court heard this argument in the middle of the case about whether they should have allowed this kid to have another assessment without anybody knowing about it. And the court said yeah that’s fine, but that was the opposite of what we intended with that bill. We actually wanted the court to oversee that. So, we amended the bill that we were working on this year to make that very clear and just in real time sent a message to the Supreme Court you got that one wrong and hopefully their attorney will go back now.
We’ve been fortunate that the public defender in Colorado and the people on the district attorney council have had a really good working relationship and that’s made a lot of things possible. But the big hurdle of course is money. This is not a sympathetic crowd. Also, people who are seriously mentally ill who are living out on the street are committing sometimes serious crimes and so the lock them up mentality is pretty strong.
Ed: Well as you indicated, this is a long process with a lot of steps. Thanks for sharing your perspective on this. Take care.
JA: Thank you.
Ed: I’ll be right back after this with Senator Byran Pelton.
TM: 27:46
Senator, welcome to the podcast. A little earlier on this episode, we heard from Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush and your colleague Senator Amabile about competency to stand trial. Your focus, as I understand, has been on behavioral health resources more broadly in the rural area that you represent and some of the more remote areas of Colorado. Can you tell us how you came to focus on this behavioral health issue and why it’s important to folks in your district.
BP: One year Colorado courts took away 68 kids from their homes to methamphetamine abuse here in Logan County alone, which costs the taxpayers $1.3 million dollars and I was on the child welfare allocation committee where we were able to fix that. It was not going to cost my local cost payers that much money because the state did take care of it. These are all issues that you know mental health; substance abuse is all tied together. People self-medicate when they don’t have the mental health that they are supposed to have. The other reason why is that we were losing kids to suicide. At COVID, just in a 10-county region that we are in with Centennial Mental Health, we loss 12 kids during COVID to suicide. Two of them were here in Logan County. These are all things that we could be working on. We don’t have the resources. I will tell you that since we did the since the BHA has been created and they took away the fact that the mental health centers were okay in Medicaid payments for other mental health providers throughout the state, we took that away where now the mental health providers can actually apply to give Medicaid to get Medicaid payments and that sort of thing. That has been a big improvement because we have actually seen more providers come to rural Colorado.
Ed: For listeners who might not be familiar with it, the BHA is Colorado’s Behavioral Health Administration. Senator, let’s talk a little about legislation. Can you tell us what you’ve worked on in the last couple of years?
BP: Just recently this last year that insurance company could not deny access to mental health by saying that it’s not a medical necessity and I think that was House Bill 1002. And we worked really, really hard to make sure that people could not be denied. This came to me via my daughter, actually had two of her friends that were denied mental health services because the insurance company deemed them not medically necessary. That was a huge issue for me especially with kids. Again, my daughter is 17 years old and she was the one that actually said to me you know you should really be part of this because this is happening close to home. So, and when I saw that here in my own neck of the woods, it was like we should do something about this because when you deny access to care by saying that. I mean don’t get me wrong. Do I understand that it might increase some of the premiums. Yes, I do understand that. But the problem is that these insurance companies are already saying we cover this and then they are not sticking to their saying that people are paying for. So, I hate doing that, but that’s something we had to do because they weren’t, you know, being good honest brokers in what people were paying for. So, there’s actually a memo by one of the insurance companies that said that pretty much said the exact same thing in my bill that said that they cannot be denied if it was deemed necessary and all of a sudden, they were denying people from getting some of their services. It’s just something that we have to continue to work on in rural Colorado and throughout the state.
TM: 31:27
Ed: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken with legislators who said that their kids gave them an ear full about some topic and that led to them looking into it a little bit more deeply. Let me ask you about this issue of trying to connect people with services before they get involved with the criminal justice system. And as I understand it, Colorado has you know made some real strides in this area. Can you talk about some of the specifics of how the state or how the legislation has gone about trying to keep people from getting involved who really should be having some behavioral health intervention.
BP: Here is my struggle with what you just said was a lot of times out here in rural Colorado, the best option for people to get the help that they need is in something like Comcore or a halfway house or that sort of thing because we just don’t have the resources out here. The nearest detox center is 90 miles away from Sterling, which is where I live. But that same detox center is further than that from Burlington. That’s who they have to use, too, is up there in Greeley. So, I can tell you that a lot of times in rural Colorado it’s hard for us to say we need to divert them over this way when the best treatment they are getting is actually in these halfway houses and that sort of thing because we just don’t have the resources out here to help them.
Ed: Looking at this legislation, do you think its producing results or is it too early to say?
BP: It is improving a little bit because my, again my frustration, is when they did the BHA it was in high hopes that we were gonna fix the mental health issues that we were having out here. We’re seeing a little bit of results, but I mean it is still the same stuff that we have been dealing with for the last oh I don’t know 10 years, 10-15 years now.
Ed: Let me ask you about bipartisanship. As I understand it a number of these bills in work don’t have a bipartisan. That’s not always the case with everything of course and why was it here?
BP: When it becomes a state-led issue and something that we can agree on especially when it comes to kids, I would say that Senator Amabile and I really look at how it affects children and that sort of thing and what we could do to be able to where I can say, I will get on this bill with you if we can make sure that there is transparency and there is money that we can use to help these kids and help with the mental behavior health. But I need to make sure that there is transparency with it and that sort of thing where we are not going overboard. There are a lot of places that we can meet in the middle and find a way to solve some of these issues. A lot of times Republicans like myself, and I believe this as well, is the government is not always the answer. However, with the behavioral health aspect until we get more resources out here right now it’s the only answer. I mean don’t get me wrong. We are seeing more resources, but until then I don’t know what we can do besides helping with grants and that sort of thing and helping these companies come to northeastern Colorado. But until we see the provider rates go up because they haven’t been going up or if they have gone up, they’ve gone up a little percentage and until we see these provider rates go up, its going to be harder and harder to get resources out here to help folks. And that’s where we come together. That’s the aspect that we come together on is if we can find some things to really say this is going to benefit my district as it will benefit yours cause I mean I have to tell you there are times where it surprises me a little bit that we have someone from Boulder County and then somebody from northeast Colorado come together on some of these aspects because it is really a totally different world in both of those areas. But I will tell you that the kids in Boulder County and the people in Boulder County are suffering just as much as the people in rural Colorado when it comes to behavioral health and drugs and everything else and substance abuse disorders. And we have big issues out here.
Ed: As I discussed with your Senate colleague, many of your fellow lawmakers around the country are grappling with these same issues. What advice would you offer as someone who has spent a lot of time working on the behavioral health and competency issues.
BP: You really need to talk to your local governments and see what’s happening on the ground especially with I mean I don’t know in the state of Colorado the Department of Human Services is underneath the county per view. I don’t know how they do it in other states, but that’s where I got a lot of my education with behavioral health is to be able to sit there and say listen, we have to find a way to help these folks because they cannot help themselves right now. We are hoping that we can get it to a place where they can help themselves, but as of right now, we need to figure out a way that these issues that are blowing up our local budgets because that’s where it affects the most is the local taxpayers. We need to figure out a way to fix these issues without hurting our local budgets. So, to really get on the ground and see what is happening in your community. We had these two people that were parents of three children and they both died of an overdose and I think it was fentanyl or it was in something and those three kids were then given to us, the state, because there were no family members around. It was just a heart-wrenching thing that, you know, those kids had no place to go. They don’t have any parents anymore. They had to go into the foster system and that’s another thing is like when the drugs and the methamphetamine gets more important than the children and this is what happens especially with fentanyl now getting just completely out of control in the state of Colorado. These are things that we see and that is heart wrenching on a community as well because community members know those kids especially in a small community like I live in and they know those kids and they don’t want to see that happen to them as well. So the best part is is to get down to the local level, see what’s going on and then see if there is a way to help because that’s kind of where I got my education was being a county commissioner and being in the department of human services and seeing where it really affects your community and you know the last place you want to spend money is in the department of human services, but when you are forced to because of all these problems, that’s what happens.
Ed: Well Senator, thanks for your time and thanks for that example because I think often when we talk about public policy it can get pretty abstract and I think when we explain real people and how they are affected it brings it home. So, thanks very much and take care.
BP: Thank you.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Colorado Senators Judy Amabile and Byran Pelton about competency to stand trial and behavioral health services. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.
TM: 38:51