LANSING — Whatever you think about politics and the way Michigan has been run, one thing is clear: For the last six years, bipartisan cooperation has been next to nonexistent.

Republicans have controlled every branch of state government and have often cheerfully rammed their bills through without even the merest attempt at compromise with the Democrats.

Democrats made no gains in last November’s elections, and there’s no mathematical reason that heavy-handed GOP dominance couldn’t continue. But there’s a new speaker of the House — 35-year-old State Rep. Tom Leonard (R., DeWitt). He prides himself on being a consensus builder and is already signaling willingness to work together on one huge issue facing the state: prison reform — especially regarding mentally ill inmates.

“Yes, I think this is absolutely a bipartisan issue,” Mr. Leonard said in a telephone interview. “I know there’s a lot of concern about this on both sides of the aisle. I want to work together.”

For years, Michigan’s ability to spend money on other priorities, including education and road repair, has been seriously hampered by an exploding corrections budget.

Back in 1973, when the state had 90 percent of its current population, there were a mere 7,900 inmates in all of the state’s prisons. Then came the drug epidemic, a wave of violent crime, and a misguided belief that the key to winning the drug war was to lock people up for long sentences or life.

This did little or nothing to stop drugs — but caused the state prison population to swell to 51,554 inmates a decade ago.

Michigan now spends $2 billion a year on prisons, far more than on higher education. The state spends a higher proportion of its budget on prisons than any other state, according to the highly regarded Bridge Magazine, and keeps people behind bars considerably longer than the national average.

Since its peak, the prison population has fallen to about 41,000 inmates, according to Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections. But the number of both mentally ill and geriatric prisoners has mushroomed.

The number of mentally ill prisoners is up by more than a thousand in the last four years — to 9,395, or more than a fifth of the total. The number of geriatric prisoners, defined as those over 50, is almost as large and growing faster.

Elderly and mentally ill prisoners not only present special correctional problems; they are among the most expensive. Many of those too mentally ill to be in the general prison population are now kept in the Woodland Center Correctional Facility near Ann Arbor.

The average inmate costs the taxpayer a little more than $35,000 a year. Inmates in Woodland cost more than $95,000 a year.

The most expensive elderly inmates sometimes cost $200,000 a year or more, because of their health care needs — and because prisoners behind bars are not eligible for Medicaid.

Speaker Leonard is the first to admit he doesn’t have all the answers — and right now, isn’t focused on how to reduce the ranks of mentally ill prisoners already in the system.

But he does think a lot more can be done to keep people with psychiatric problems from reaching prison, primarily by using a system of “mental health courts” to order those who have been diagnosed with mental illness to take their medication.

“This is the best way to get them the help they need and to keep them out of the prison system,” Mr. Leonard said. “I know because I used to be a complete skeptic and I am happy to admit I was wrong.”

When he was a clerk for Genesee County Probate Judge Jennie Barkey, she pioneered the idea of “mental health courts,” which really means reserving a portion of the docket for those with mental illness. She sentenced an offender to mental health treatment, rather than jail. “Judge, this is never going to work.” Mr. Leonard told her.

A year later, when the inmate had successfully completed the program, “I found myself apologizing both to the person and the judge,” he told me.

Now a believer, last year Mr. Leonard got a bill through the legislature to vastly improve what’s called “Kevin’s Law,” which allows judges statewide to order outpatient treatment, normally with drugs, for a person who has had their mental illness confirmed by a doctor.

This is exactly what needed to happen, said Milton Mack, a longtime chief probate judge in Wayne County who was generally regarded as the state’s most knowledgeable judicial authority on criminal mental health issues.

Some of the state’s prison mental health problems stemmed from a decision in the early 1990s to close most state mental institutions, which was part of a deinstitutionalization wave nationally.

More mental health institutions are probably needed today, Mr. Mack said, but there is not much will to build them.

He believes what’s needed even more is agreement to define mental illness according to what science knows now, rather than what courts thought it was in the 19th century.

Doing something about the number and cost of geriatric inmates may be even harder.

What is clear is that if nothing is done, the costs of the Michigan prison system will continue to swell. 

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan. Contact him at:omblade@aol.com.

First Published January 6, 2017, 5:00 a.m.