State destroyed key records on treatment of mentally ill Baltimore detainees, ACLU says

BALTIMORE -- In a corner of Baltimore's main pretrial detention facility, those with severe mental illness wait, often for months, to be transferred to a state-run psychiatric hospital for evaluation or treatment.

At the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center, these detainees are typically kept in the inpatient mental health unit, a segment of the aging facility that has become known for its "extremely harsh" living conditions, according to attorneys for the ACLU's National Prison Project, which tours parts of Baltimore's sprawling pretrial jail complex regularly as part of a decades-old health care lawsuit.

During a tour of the main jail's mental health unit in December, ACLU attorney Corene Kendrick saw a notebook with handwritten logs detailing how much time each person incarcerated there was spending outside their cells — or why they weren't.

Read More at The Baltimore Banner