fficult for community mental health providers to maintain contact with incarcerated clients. When jail-based mental health professionals evaluate a newly arrested defendant at intake, it is often as if the patient has never before received mental health services. Members of the jail's mental health staff interview the patient and make informed guesses about the person's diagnosis and which medications may be helpful; no system exists to facilitate or even encourage the exchange of information between community treatment providers and jail staff. Having to "reinvent the wheel" with each incoming patient is frustratingly inefficient and clinically unsound. Many inmates have a psychiatrist or case manager in the community who can tell the workers in jail, for example, that the patient's last diagnosis was schizoaffective disorder and that he has had bad side effect reactions to Haldol and Mellaril and Lithium and Zoloft, but recently has been doing well on a dose of 15 mg. of Stelazine and 1200 mg. of Depakote at night plus 1 mg. of Cogentin two times a day. As any community mental health worker can attest, it can be exceedingly difficult for an outsider to locate a client in the city's criminal justice system. The process of finding out which jail an individual is in is a complicated on requiring multiple phone calls. Once an inmate is located, it is difficult to even find the names and numbers of whom to talk to in the individual jails, much less get information regarding an inmate's treatment status. Community mental health workers who manage to contact a facility where a client is being held often find that no one staff person is responsible for gathering or relaying information about what medication the client has been taking or what diagnoses have been made. Defense attorneys, who could act as liaisons between a community program and the jail, often do not see this as part of their job or understand the advantages of involving a comm...
