A grant through United Way will help fund a clinical therapist position at the Buchanan County Jail.

Tom Cates is the Captain of Corrections at the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Department. Cates said they have been seeing a huge increase in the number of inmates coming in that have received mental health treatment or need mental health treatment and an increase in psychiatric and mental health medications given. 

“In 2015, our average was about eight percent of our population took psychiatric and mental health medication and now we’re up to about 21 percent of our population are on those type of medications,” Cates said. “And we’ve seen a lot of behavioral incidents with the inmates that we felt could be cut off at the past if we had some sort of ongoing mental health treatment, psychiatric services, therapeutic services available to them.”  

Cates said the Sheriff’s Department had been working with a Family Guidance Center employee who suggested putting together a proposal for a grant to get a full time clinical therapist assigned to the Buchanan County Jail. Cates said they ended up being assigned the grant money through United Way. 

“We’ll be able to get that position established and opened. We’ll actually be able to have a person in our facility, 40 hours a week, that is fully trained and we will have them at the ready for any type of mental health screenings that need to be done, suicide prevention therapies that need to be done, ongoing clinical therapy that needs to happen with any of our inmates,” Cates said. “They’ll just be able to provide much better service to the inmates that we’ve got in custody that are under our care and control. A lot of times we tend to think of it as control and not so much of the care end but we do have an obligation to make sure that people are fit and in a good place, mental health wise while they’re in our facility.. I think we can make a real positive impact on some of the inmate’s lives, hopefully for the duration of their life.” 

Cates said the department is currently in the process of putting together a job description for the position and his goal is to have the position in place by the beginning of 2018.