Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes is making a big move in an effort to address the growing problem of inmates with mental health issues and substance abuse problems in the county jails.
The county is hiring a psychiatric nurse practitioner and a counselor who will be dedicated to treating inmates with mental health issues, and the jails in Greensboro and High Point will be implementing a new incarceration system in which inmates with mental health problems will all be removed from the jails’ general population and placed together in a single 40-person pod in the Greensboro jail. Likewise, drug addicts will be placed in an adjacent 40-person pod on the same floor as the mental health patients.
For the first time, those two problem populations will be isolated from the general population and consolidated in a way that makes regular and consistent treatment for their issues much easier, and one that makes life easier on all other inmates as well.