Good on Reuters for investigating and sharing this data. The jail system is a wreck and people with mental health issues do not have good outcomes in it.

I worked with these folks on the mental health side years ago and we avoided putting our people in King County Jail whenever at all possible for a lot of reasons. Support in the form of mental health professionals, other social workers, and basic training for the cops and corrections officers is severely lacking.

Some of my guys would be in and out of KCJ dozens of times for minor charges, which would interrupt what little treatment and stability they had, sometimes catastrophically. Between that and the ER visits they were probably costing the city and state tens of thousands a year. Considering how cheap housing was when we could find it and the incredibly powerful effect it had on their lives and outcomes, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process. And Seattle is known for being a compassionate, responsive city for this stuff! How it must be in other places I can't even imagine.