Big Earl is crouching naked inside a cell at the Natchez police department while officers watch from a safe distance. He rises suddenly, all 6 ft. and 275 lbs. of him, hulking now over his captors. His psychotropics have long since worn off because he stopped taking them, and the police want to scoop him up and help him find rest in a bed finally ready for him at the state mental hospital. Instead, Big Earl has jammed his foot in the toilet, flooding the concrete floor. To lure him out, they have offered him 7-Up and $100, but he won't budge. He prefers to negotiate by threatening to throw feces at them.
Behind a surgical mask to filter the odor, police chief Willie Huff tells two officers in latex gloves to use riot shields and ease Big Earl to the floor while the others wrap blankets around him and slide him outside. A tall man, Huff cautiously leads the charge, clutching Earl, hoping not to hurt him and praying not to get sued. He knows mental patients don't belong in small-town jails, but where else can they go? What else can he do?
"If we are civilized, we should not allow this to happen," says Huff, 51, who grew up here, amid the willows, magnolias and antebellum homes. Natchez has always had its collection of eccentrics (an April Fools' Day Parade is in the works), and it has always had its share of the mentally ill. But it used to be that the latter were packed off forever to an institution far away and the police department could go back to its business of caring for just the eccentrics. But since deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960s, when thousands were released from sometimes abusive institutions, they have become Chief Huff's business. When they threaten themselves or somebody else, he holds them until there's a place at Mississippi State Hospital, two hours north in Whitfield, where they typically get treated for 21 days, only to find themselves back in Chief Huff's care. "If somebody goes off their medication and slaps their mama or they run around the yard naked," says Huff, "it's the police who get called to deal with it." And it's the police who will be a main target if the American Civil Liberties Union decides later this year to challenge a 25-year-old state law that allows mental patients to be kept in jail when no other place can be found for them.
Since he became chief seven years ago, five people have either killed somebody or committed suicide while waiting for a bed at Mississippi State Hospital or after they returned home from psychiatric care without follow-up. The town's only private psychiatrist has just retired and can't find a replacement willing to move here. At the town's well-intentioned but underfunded mental-health clinic for indigents, the staff turnover is 100% annually, mostly on account of burnout. One psychologist and two counselors divvy up the 200-plus "consumers" in Adams County. For many, the extent of therapy is little more than a weekly or monthly visit for their pills or shots.
To avoid parking any critically psychotic patients in jail, Gwen Turner, a retired chancery clerk and advocate for the mentally ill, proposed five years ago turning an empty downtown building into a crisis center where Natchez Regional Hospital doctors could volunteer to treat these patients. (The regional hospital won't accept them.) But she found little interest in her proposal.