Med Center Cuts Affect Sheriff

              Med center cuts affect sheriff
By ROBERT MOORE
The Times
If state budget cuts force the
closure or extreme reduction of
services of the LSU Medical Center's
psychiatric unit, one hard-hit group
will be Caddo Parish law enforce-ment
officials, Sheriff Don Hathaway
said in a talk Wednesday.
Addressing a group of about 20
people attending a meeting of the
Black Republican Council of
Shreveport-Bossier, Hathaway said
the elimination of the center's
psychiatric services would "present a
tremendous problem to law enforce-ment."
In a later interview, the sheriff said
that while his deputies do not take
large numbers of people for care and
treatment at the unit, those that are
taken there are usually in dire need of
help and supervision.
"I don't know what we are going to
do," said Hathaway. "We just think
that's very serious from our stand-point.
It does not take us to have but
one person who should be committed
in the appropriate place on our hands,
and we don't have any place to take
them. What are we going to do?"
Hathaway was joined in his concern
over the effect of the contemplated
program cuts by Major Jim Morris,
who was hired as director of Caddo
Detention Center when Hathaway as-sumed
administration of the facility
from the Caddo Parish Police Jury in
mid-April.
"Mental health is a real problem in
any penal situation, and we're no
different here," said Morris, who
holds a master's degree in public
administration and who developed
the criminal justice program at
Monroe's Northeast Louisiana Un-iversity.
"If we did not have access to
a public facility, I don't know what we
would do from a cost standpoint, if
nothing else."
Plagued by falling revenues, Gov.
David Treen has instituted 4.4 per-cent
spending cuts in nearly all state
agencies, and officials at LSU
Medical Center have targeted its
psychiatric operation as one that
might see reduced services to meet
that spending target.
On another matter, Hathaway re-peated
an oft-trumpeted call for new
jail facilities downtown, the sheriff
saying that Caddo Detention Center,
located 30 miles southwest of
Shreveport, is simply not built to
accommodate the parish's detention
requirements for some 375 inmates,
some 68 percent of whom are black.
Built as a minimum security facili-ty
for people convicted of lesser
crimes, Caddo Detention Center is not
adequate for handling "murderers
and rapists and so forth," said
Hathaway.
The location poses problems in
transferring inmates to and from the
courthouse and LSU Medical Center,
in setting up work-release programs
and in getting volunteers to work with
inmates in rehabilitation programs.
In addition, he said, the facility is not
designed to provide adequate separa-tion
of types of inmates to protect
non-violent offenders from more
dangerous inmates.