Webb remanded back to hospital room

(CNS): Travis Webb (32), who was recently arrested after he escaped from the hospital where he is being held indefinitely since he was found not guilty of trying to kill his son by reason of insanity, is back in the same room. Webb has been charged with escaping lawful custody, and after appearing in court on Friday, he was remanded back into the care of the Health Services Authority.

Webb’s situation has drawn considerable sympathy from CNS readers over the last week or so since we reported that Webb had escaped from the small room where he is being held in the mental health ward at the hospital. Readers have also expressed their concern that Cayman still has no proper facilities to house people who commit crimes due to severe mental health problems.

While Webb is the first person in Cayman to be found not guilty of a very serious crime based on an insanity defence, he is by no means the only patient who suffers from complex mental health problems that have diminished their responsibility for their crimes.

At the moment, Webb is the only person held at the hospital. The others are still housed at HMP Fairbanks and Northward. He, too, had been held in jail for some time but was moved to the hospital in 2020.

While the health ministry waits on the myriad problems surrounding the construction of the long-planned residential health facility, it is apparent that many people in the community were unaware that the Poinciana Mental Health Centre will not house the criminally insane and was never designed to do so.

In 2018, Dr Mark Lockhart, who was the government’s most senior psychiatrist at the time, made it clear the facility would not hold anyone who posed a danger and that the facility was not to hold those considered dangerous or who have already committed crimes as a result of their mental health conditions.

Speaking to CNS that same year, more than six years ago, the prison director at the time, Steven Barrett, warned that the prison service needed to address how it would deal with prisoners suffering from mental health conditions in the years to come. But nothing has been done to deal with these inmates.

The former director said that when people suffering from mental health issues are incarcerated, it can present serious problems for the prison, and if Cayman were going to embark on a new prison, it would need a stand-alone mental health unit that is appropriately resourced and caters for men, women and juvenile offenders.

Although the prison has access to psychiatrists and a psychologist on site, it is often the prison staff who deal with the crises that arise in the prison population because of the significant number of people with mental health issues, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, treated and untreated.