Executive Summary
Los Angeles County stands at a critical inflection point in its approach to behavioral health, public safety, and homelessness. The County’s stated commitment to Care First, Jail Last reflects a deliberate shift toward treating mental illness and instability as public health challenges rather than criminal justice issues. Yet the current proposal to construct a new “Mental Health Jail” signals a departure from that commitment, one that risks reinforcing the very systems the County has pledged to transform.
This paper advances a clear argument: the expansion of carceral infrastructure, even under the guise of treatment, is inconsistent with both the evidence base and the County’s policy direction. Drawing on system data, fiscal analysis, and lived experience, it demonstrates that Los Angeles County’s challenge is not a lack of secure beds, but a lack of a fully developed, community-based continuum of care.
The path forward is not to build new jails, but to invest in what works, acute and subacute treatment, supportive housing, diversion programs, and step-down systems that promote long-term stability. The decision before the County is not merely about infrastructure. It is about whether Los Angeles will align its investments with its values.
I. Policy Context: From Commitment to Contradiction
The Care First, Jail Last commitment is underscored by the Community First Care Investment (CFCI) funding framework that was established to fundamentally reshape how Los Angeles County responds to individuals with behavioral health needs. It reflects a recognition that incarceration has functioned as a default system of care, not because it is effective, but because alternatives have been underdeveloped or underfunded.
In this context, the proposal to construct a Mental Health Jail introduces a profound contradiction. While framed as a clinical solution, it relies on a carceral structure to deliver care. This approach blurs the distinction between treatment and incarceration, effectively redefining custody as care rather than replacing it.
The contradiction is not theoretical. It is structural. Capital investment in a new jail regardless of its designation, anchors the system in a model that prioritizes containment over recovery. It stands to redirect CFCI resources away from community-based solutions and reinforces the very pipeline that Care First, Jail Last was designed to dismantle.
II. The Current System: Jails as the Largest Mental Health Provider
Los Angeles County does not face a shortage of correctional capacity for individuals with mental illness. On the contrary, it already operates what has been widely recognized as the largest mental health institution in the United States in its jail system. This reality is not a marker of success. It is an indicator of systemic failure.
Data from the Vera Institute of Justice highlights the scale and consequences of this dynamic. A significant portion of the jail population presents with identified mental health needs, while the system itself remains overcrowded and ill-equipped to provide consistent, effective treatment. Care within this environment is inherently constrained by the priorities of custody, where safety and control necessarily supersede therapeutic goals.
As a result, individuals cycle through a predictable pattern: incarceration, short-term stabilization, release without adequate support, and eventual return to custody. This cycle is not driven by individual pathology alone, but by the absence of sustained, community-based care. What’s clear to all that care to see, a Mental Health Jail does not disrupt this cycle. It institutionalizes it.
III. Fiscal Reality: Cost Without Outcome
The financial implications of the County’s current approach further underscore the need for a strategic shift. Jail-based care is among the most expensive interventions available, with annual costs averaging approximately $89,000 per person. By contrast, community-based housing paired with supportive services costs significantly less on a per-day basis while delivering more durable outcomes. However, the central issue is not cost alone, it is value.
Incarceration produces temporary stabilization at best, often followed by relapse and re-entry into the system. Community-based models, by contrast, are designed to sustain recovery through housing stability, clinical continuity, and social integration. As the Vera Institute notes, “incarceration is not a substitute for treatment.”
Investing in a Mental Health Jail therefore represents a high-cost, low-return strategy. While it may create the appearance of increased capacity, it does little to alter the underlying dynamics that drive individuals into the system in the first place. Public resources are absorbed into a model designed for containment rather than continuity, where short-term stabilization is not matched with long-term support.
Without corresponding investments in housing, community-based treatment, and step-down care, individuals are released back into the same conditions that precipitated their involvement, perpetuating a cycle of crisis, incarceration, and return. In this way, the investment not only fails to resolve systemic pressures, but it also reinforces them.
IV. The Continuum That Does Not Yet Exist at Scale
Los Angeles County is not without effective models. In fact, it has already begun to build the foundation of a more responsive system. The challenge lies not in innovation, but in scale and integration. A fully realized continuum of care would include several interdependent components.
First, expanded acute and subacute treatment capacity, operated in non-carceral settings by the Department of Mental Health, would provide clinically appropriate environments for stabilization. These facilities must be accessible through multiple entry points, including law enforcement diversion and community outreach.
Second, a robust step-down system is essential to bridge the gap between stabilization and long-term independence. Without this layer, individuals are discharged from treatment into instability, undermining the gains achieved during care.
Third, Permanent Supportive Housing Plus (PSH+) offers a model for individuals with the highest levels of acuity. By integrating housing with intensive services, PSH+ addresses both clinical and social determinants of health.
Fourth, the continued expansion of Office of Diversion and Reentry (ODR) programs demonstrates that incarceration is not the only pathway. Diversion models have shown measurable success in reducing jail populations while improving individual outcomes.
Finally, initiatives emerging through Justice Care Opportunities Department (JCOD) and community-based partnerships provide opportunities to scale housing solutions in innovative ways, including the use of faith-based and nonprofit land.
Individually, these components are effective. Collectively, they represent the system Los Angeles County has committed to building. The failure to scale them leaves incarceration as the default.
V. Lived Experience and the Meaning of Stability
Policy discussions often reduce individuals to categories, unhoused, justice-involved, mentally ill. Yet lived experience reveals a more nuanced reality. Like there is a distinction between being unhoused and being homeless. One reflects a lack of physical shelter. The other reflects a loss of connection to family, to community, to systems of support. It is possible to endure periods without housing while maintaining a sense of stability rooted in relationship. It is when those connections are severed that the full weight of homelessness is felt. Stability is not defined solely by physical shelter, but by the presence of meaningful ties, to family, to community, and to systems of care that reinforce a sense of belonging.
Carceral systems, by design, disrupt those connections. They isolate individuals from the very networks that sustain recovery, replacing community with custody and continuity with control. In doing so, they often deepen the conditions they are intended to address. Transferring individuals from one broken system to another, from the instability of homelessness into the isolation of incarceration does not constitute a solution. It is a reconfiguration of the problem. When incarceration becomes the primary response to unmet behavioral health and housing needs, the system is not resolving instability; it is managing it, often at the cost of long-term recovery.
Community-based systems, when properly structured, offer a fundamentally different approach. They rebuild connection, restore continuity, and create pathways to belonging. They recognize that recovery is not achieved through separation, but through integration.
If recovery is the goal, then connection must be the method.
VI. The Perception Challenge: Why Jails Continue to Be Seen as the Solution
Despite decades of evidence demonstrating the limitations of incarceration as a response to behavioral health needs, jails continue to be widely perceived as a necessary and immediate solution to complex social challenges. This perception is not without context. Jails represent a visible, centralized, and controlled response to crisis, one that offers the appearance of order, safety, and accountability in the face of public concern.
In moments of system strain, particularly when communities are confronted with visible homelessness or untreated mental illness, the impulse toward containment can feel both intuitive and urgent. Jails, by their very nature, provide a sense of resolution: individuals are removed from the street, stabilized in the short term, and placed within a controlled environment. For many, this is interpreted as action. However, this perception, while understandable, is incomplete.
The use of jails as a default response reflects not their effectiveness, but the absence or underdevelopment of viable alternatives at scale. Where community-based systems are fragmented, under-resourced, or insufficiently visible, incarceration fills the gap, not because it works, but because it is available.
At the same time, public narratives often reinforce this dynamic. Media coverage and public discourse frequently focus on crisis, risk, and system failure, shaping a perception that community-based approaches are either insufficient or ineffective. Far less attention is given to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that housing, treatment, and diversion programs produce better long-term outcomes for both individuals and public safety.
This imbalance in narrative creates a policy environment in which investments in carceral infrastructure are more easily justified, while community-based solutions, despite their effectiveness, struggle to gain the same level of public and political support. Yet the data tells a different story. Programs such as the Office of Diversion and Reentry (ODR), Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and community-based treatment models have demonstrated measurable success in reducing recidivism, stabilizing individuals with high-acuity needs, and improving overall system outcomes. These models do not simply remove individuals from crisis; they resolve it through continuity of care and long-term support.
The challenge, therefore, is not only to expand what works, but to make it visible, credible, and politically legible. Policymakers and the public must be able to see not only the cost of failure, but the reality of success. Reframing the narrative is essential. Public safety is not achieved through containment alone, but through stability. Stability is not produced by incarceration, but by housing, treatment, and connection.
If jails continue to be seen as the solution, it is not because they are the best option, it is because the better option has not yet been fully realized, scaled, or communicated. The question is not whether we can build more space to hold people in crisis. The question is whether we are willing to build the systems that prevent the crisis from recurring.
VII. Policy Implications and Strategic Direction
The decision before Los Angeles County is not simply whether to build a facility. It is whether to align its investments with its stated vision. A Mental Health Jail may appear to address immediate system pressures, but it does so by reinforcing a model that has consistently produced poor outcomes. By contrast, investment in community-based care addresses both immediate needs and long-term stability.
To realign with Care First, Jail Last, the County should prioritize the expansion of non-carceral treatment capacity, scale proven diversion programs, invest in housing solutions for high-acuity populations, and build the step-down infrastructure necessary to sustain recovery. Equally important is the establishment of accountability measures that evaluate success based on outcomes housing stability, reduced recidivism, and improved health not simply the number of beds filled.
Conclusion: A Defining Choice
Los Angeles County has already articulated the vision. The community organized and drafted a plan, the people voted and adopted that plan; and the Board of Supervisor endorsed that plan. The question before us all now is whether we have the will to act on it.
The construction of a Mental Health Jail would not represent a new approach. It would extend an old one under a different name. It would formalize the role of incarceration as a primary response to mental illness, despite clear evidence that this approach is both ineffective and costly. The alternative is not theoretical. It is already visible in the programs the County has begun to build programs that treat individuals as people to be supported rather than problems to be contained.
The choice is therefore not between action and inaction. It is between two fundamentally different systems. One manages crisis. The other creates stability. One cycles individuals through institutions. The other anchors them in community. To choose Care First, Jail Last is to choose the latter, and to invest accordingly.
I’ve already made my choice. What about you?
Pastor Troy F. Vaughn
Co-Founder and CEO, LARRP
