“Our numbers are getting worse,” Wetzel said. “It’s a combination of more folks coming in — three decades of overusing incarceration as a response to crime — but, also, we’re probably doing a better job of identifying folks, whereas before they would just slip through the cracks.”
On Tuesday, state officials announced a multiyear initiative aimed at safely reducing the number of people with mental illness in Pennsylvania jails — a problem that has so far been intractable in the face of criminal-justice reform efforts.