She had to try hard to get there, but Linda Lee Kraige is where she wants to be: an isolation cell on the first floor of the Roanoke County-Salem Jail.
Wearing a blaze orange jumpsuit that makes her long white hair all the more striking, Kraige smiles often during an interview in a nearby holding cell. Her eyes widen as she answers questions with a childlike eagerness to please.
Occasionally, though, her face darkens, betraying the mood swings, the schizophrenia and the bipolar disorder that have taken the 58-year-old woman to more jails, prisons and mental hospitals than she can remember.
Given her choice of institutions — or even a shot at freedom — Kraige would stay where she is.
“I get my medication, and I get a cell to myself,” Kraige said. “If they would please just leave me in my own cell. That’s all I ask.
“I can handle jail,” she said.
But jails in Virginia are having a hard time handling inmates like Kraige.
Roanoke County Sheriff Gerald Holt said that between 25 percent and 30 percent of his inmates suffer from mental illness. In an overcrowded jail where three inmates share cells that are meant for one, Holt can afford to isolate only the most serious psychiatric cases.
The rest are integrated into the jail’s general population. They get their medication if they’re lucky, but little more.
“The bottom line is, seldom do they get any treatment while they’re in jail,” said Holt, who serves on a state panel studying mental health concerns.
Mentally ill people made up about 16 percent of the jail population statewide in 2005, according to the most recent figures from the Senate Finance Committee. State officials will survey jails again this week to get a more up-to-date figure on what some say is a growing problem.
According to a study released last week by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, there were more mentally ill people in jails than in private and state mental hospitals combined two years ago.
JLARC, the investigative arm of the General Assembly, relied on the 2005 survey of jails for its comparison.
A one-day snapshot found that of 6,359 mentally ill people being held on Sept. 13, 2005, 59 percent were in jails, although some had relatively minor emotional problems. Another 23 percent were in state hospitals, and 17 percent were in private mental institutions.
While some mentally ill people behind bars are a threat to themselves or others, advocates say many more are being held on nonviolent offenses and misdemeanors that could be better addressed through treatment.
Holt said he has seen some people get stuck in his jail on relatively minor charges because they weren’t mentally competent to understand the conditions of bond.
“We really are doing a disservice to our people when we put them in jail,” said Bill Farrington, president of the state chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
‘She needed out’
Kraige was tired of wheelchairs and walkers. She had been living at Hollins Manor, an assisted-living facility on Williamson Road, since 2002.
Unhappy with her living conditions, Kraige decided it was time to get herself arrested and go to jail.
She had used a similar tactic in 1999, when she was homeless on the streets of Roanoke. She walked into the Texas Tavern with an empty handgun and half-heartedly demanded cash. Although no one took her seriously at the time — the patrons kept eating and the cook kept cooking — a judge ended up sentencing Kraige to 18 months in prison for having a gun as a convicted felon.
When she got out of prison, Kraige was placed at Hollins Manor. By February of this year, her new life there had grown old.
So she walked across the street and tried to hold up a Subway restaurant. Lacking both a gun and credibility, she left with just $1.79 from the tip jar.
Kraige went to a nearby Kroger and confessed to a clerk. “I said, ‘Would you please call 911 and get the police over here. I need to get to jail real quick,’ ” Kraige recalled.
Three months later, Kraige was out on bond — and back at Hollins Manor.
Her next attempt at incarceration proved more successful. On the night of July 22, Kraige took a cigarette lighter and set fire to a blanket in her room. By the time the first fire truck arrived, another resident had doused her burning mattress with a fire extinguisher.
Kraige told authorities that “the place needed to burn and she needed out,” according to a fire investigation report filed in Roanoke County Circuit Court. This time, Kraige told an investigator, “maybe they would get the hint and let her stay in jail.”
She has been there ever since, with no regrets.
“People here, they’re more healthy, they’re more wholesome, they’re not broken down, they don’t ride in wheelchairs, they don’t walk with walkers,” she said. “I just couldn’t take Hollins Manor anymore because all the people there are hurting.”
But now that she’s back in the criminal justice system, Kraige’s chances of getting meaningful treatment are bleak. The only way she could go to a mental hospital would be on a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Three psychiatrists have examined Kraige, and they all found her competent to stand trial and legally sane at the time of the offense, said Tom Blaylock, a Roanoke lawyer who represents her on an attempted arson charge.
“We’ve got a chronically mentally ill person who needs treatment, obviously, who’s probably not going to get it,” Blaylock said.
“It’s just tragic, really.”
Searching for space
To measure the mental health of their jail populations, Holt and other sheriffs across Virginia count the number of inmates who are receiving psychiatric medication.
Holt said his cases range from people on Prozac for mild depression to paranoid schizophrenics who pose a threat to themselves and others.
In the latter cases, the sheriff believes the inmates would be better off committed to a mental health facility. Yet case workers from the community services board, who evaluate inmates to see if they meet the “imminent danger” threshold required for an involuntary commitment, often rule that inmates don’t meet those criteria, Holt said.
“I get the impression that as long as they’re in jail, they’re considered to be OK and safe,” he said.
But secure psychiatric beds are so scarce in the Roanoke Valley that mental health patients sometimes spend hours and even days waiting in hospital emergency rooms for space to become available.
“We essentially are having to prioritize all the time,” said Gail Burruss, director of adult clinical services for Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare.
Even if there’s bed space available, the civil commitment process can be so time-consuming that police officers who encounter the mentally ill are often reluctant to use it, Farrington said.
“They recognize that it’s a mental health issue, but they also recognize that ‘I brought this person in three times before for the same thing’ ” on a civil commitment order, he said. “So the easier thing to do is to take them to jail and let the jail deal with it.”
With mental health issues getting more attention in the wake of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech, officials in both the public safety and mental heath arenas agree that problems in the jails need to be fixed.
Sadly, the person interviewed for this article who seemed the most satisfied with the system is mentally ill.
Life in an institution
Asked by a psychiatrist in 1999 who her best friend was, Linda Lee Kraige named a deputy at the Roanoke City Jail.
She gave a different response last week, saying it was her brother-in-law. But Kraige still has a close bond with jails and their staff, cheerfully chatting with correctional officers while being led to her interview last week.
Kraige was lucid for much of the interview. She displayed none of the delusions outlined in psychiatric reports from prior criminal cases: that she was once pregnant by Satan; that she hears the voice of her deceased mother saying “I think it is awful Linda got in so much trouble”; that she found inspiration in the two teenage gunmen at Columbine High School.
Now taking her medication regularly, Kraige says she’s in better shape than she has ever been in.
But the thought of returning to society frightens her, and she seems resigned to the ever-increasing possibility of living out her life in an institution.
“If y’all know anybody, I don’t care who they are, it could be somebody down on the market, that can help me in any way, I’m open to help,” she said.
“I’m not begging. But what else can you do, when you don’t have a place to live and you don’t have any money?”