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It was not an accident or a mistake: At the biggest hospital in Mississippi’s DeSoto County, south of Memphis, patients are sometimes jailed to await mental health treatment, according to sheriff’s department call logs, incident reports and jail dockets.
Nakema Fox was one of them, in 2007.
Sheriff Travis Patten has long said people being committed shouldn’t be held in his jail at all.
People were jailed without charges at least 2,000 times from 2019 to 2022 as they waited for evaluations and treatment for mental illness or substance abuse, in just 19 counties. About 130 stays were longer than 30 days.