But because of bottlenecks in services here, and across the country, people in jail with serious mental illness are waiting months to receive the care needed to "restore" their competency to stand trial. Many inmates wait for months to be admitted to the Montana State Hospital for mental health treatment so they can stand trial.īefore their legal case can proceed, people charged with crimes in Montana must understand the charges they face and participate in their own defense. "So, they just deteriorate within our facility," Root says of her and other inmates with serious mental health conditions.Īaron Bolton/Montana Public Radio The entrance to the Flathead County Detention Center in Kalispell, Montana. Meanwhile, the northwestern Montana jail where she's waiting isn't equipped to treat mental illness, and the jail staff can't force her to take her prescribed psychiatric medication. The woman in the Kalispell jail had spent months on the waiting list over the summer the list reached 70 people. Like many inmates deemed unfit for trial due to a mental health condition, she has been stuck on a waiting list for the Montana State Hospital's 54-bed forensic unit, which stabilizes inmates through medication and treatment so they are competent to stand trial. An evaluation after her arrest determined that mental illness prevented her from standing trial, and that she required treatment at the Montana State Hospital, the state-run inpatient psychiatric hospital. This woman was charged with burglary in September 2022, Root says. Inside the cell, dimly lit by a single window, a woman is curled up under a fleece blanket, only her bright-pink fingernails sticking out. "She's been here almost a year, just laying on her bed," she says. His brother Garry is a longtime local attorney who runs a law firm in Kalispell.Inside the white-brick hallways of the Flathead County Detention Center, Jail Commander Jen Root walks up to a steel door and looks through a small window at the inmate. Michael says the business has sold about 6,000 mobile homes over the decades. National Guard, while Michael is the general manager of Patty Seaman Homes, which was started by his parents, Patty and Vernon. Mary recently retired after 30 years in the U.S. The three Seaman siblings are the children of Michael and Mary Seaman. That photo of the Saureys from 1891 is a window into the broader lore of the region and the specific history of an influential multigenerational family that still calls the Flathead Valley home. Saurey then became a foreman for logging crews in the Whitefish and Half Moon areas, clearing out extensive swaths of forest to open the area up to settlement while providing timber for railroad ties and development. In 1891, Robert and Mary Saurey, the Seaman siblings’ great-great grandparents, made the five-day wagon trip from Hamilton to Columbia Falls, described in family historical documents as a fledgling “tent city.” Saurey worked on a logging crew that hauled timbers to build a trestle in Bad Rock Canyon for the new Great Northern Railway line through Northwest Montana. Then they literally laid the groundwork for the arrival of the railroad and cleared the way for everybody who followed. Columbia Falls near the banks of the Flathead River in the early 1890s
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