The first thing that a visitor to Island County Jail will notice is the smell. Even before walking through the worn metal door of the cell, the odor is overwhelming.

Step inside the four walls covered with brown smears of human feces and bits of toilet paper, and breathing the air becomes unbearable.

A 30-year-old South Whidbey man in the midst of a mental-health crisis has been living in the cell since July and may be there for weeks to come, despite exhaustive efforts made by the Island County jail interim chief and others to get the inmate mental health treatment.

“It’s frustrating,” said Chris Garden, interim jail chief. “I want to get him the help he needs and I just can’t get it to him.”

County officials have dedicated significant new resources to the jail — hundreds of thousands of dollars — but they are still hamstrung when it comes to dealing with the most difficult mentally ill inmates.

In the case of the current inmate, he won’t take his psychiatric medicine and the jail doesn’t have the authority to force him to. He’s 87th on a wait list to go to Western State Hospital, the state’s psychiatric hospital.

Garden tried to get the man involuntarily committed to another secure mental-health facility. For that to happen, though, he must be evaluated by a mental health professional.

The problem, Garden found, is that the facilities won’t take him if he’s charged with a crime. But, if the charges are dropped, there’s no guarantee he will be involuntarily committed or that there will be a bed available; there’s a very real chance he would be released.

“I can’t in good conscience let that happen,” Garden said. “In my mind, I can’t let a guy like that walk down the street.”

Garden, a longtime deputy and firefighter, comes at the job of running the jail with fresh eyes. Island County Sheriff Mark Brown asked him to manage the jail after the former jail chief resigned in the wake of 25-year-old Keaton Farris’s dehydration death at the facility last April.

Garden spearheaded many reforms at the jail — including new models for providing health and mental-health care of inmates — but he’s run into many frustrations.

Not surprising to anyone paying attention, one of the biggest obstacles in running a safe, small-county jail is dealing with mentally ill inmates. Everybody seems to agree that jails are not the right place to hold or treat people with mental health problems, but they have become the de facto warehousing facilities for people in crisis in many communities.

Yet corrections deputies are not mental-health professionals and don’t have advanced training to deal with mentally ill people, though Garden is bringing in an expert to do some training. Jails simply don’t have adequate staff or facilities — or the legal ability — to adequately  care for people in mental-health crises, Garden said.

“This is not where he should be,” Nancy Stultz, a licensed nurse practitioner who works in the jail, said about the troubled inmate. “It’s really hard as a medical professional to see where he’s at and not be able to get him the help he needs.”

Brown has called local lawmakers and state Social and Health Services. He reached out to other jails with psychiatric units to see if the man can be transferred.

Likewise, the Island County Prosecutor’s Office has worked to “get the various players together to provide him appropriate treatment,” according to Prosecutor Greg Banks.

So far, nothing has worked.

Jackie Henderson, the director of the county’s Human Services Department, said her office is providing a mental-health professional at the jail who’s tried to help the inmate. She said that the best place for him is probably Western State Hospital, but that the waiting list is long because of staff shortages. Officials there are unable to find enough qualified people to work at the hospital, she said.

Yet Banks pointed out that Western State Hospital’s goal in dealing with the inmate is not long-term treatment. The court ordered the man be sent to the hospital for a forensic evaluation and treatment concerning his legal competency to face criminal charges.

Banks said the jail and his office are trying to get him involuntarily committed to one of the facilities in the region where he can be restored to health.

The problem, Henderson said, is that designated mental health professionals — the people who decide if a person should be committed — won’t go into the Island County jail to evaluate an inmate. Under state rules, she said, the person facing an unadjudicated charge can’t be involuntarily committed to a treatment facility.

Garden noted that the designated mental health professionals will go into Snohomish County jail to evaluate inmates, though he said the professionals there have a different contractual relationship with the county.

In Island County, the professionals work for Compass Mental Health.

An official from Compass Mental Health didn’t return a call for comment by press time.

Another wrinkle, Henderson said, is that Whidbey General Hospital does not have psychiatric services, which means the hospital can’t hold mentally ill people for even a short period.

The current situation, county officials say, is untenable for both the troubled inmate, the corrections deputies who have to deal with him and even neighboring inmates.

The South Whidbey man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a family member. At the jail, it quickly became apparent that he was having mental health problems.

Corrections deputies initially placed him in the “blue room,” which is an empty cell designed to prevent people from hurting themselves. Garden said the man “papered the walls” with his own feces, pushing it deep into vents. He threw feces at the corrections deputies and dumped cups of urine on them.

After the man was moved to another cell, Garden cleaned the blue room himself since he believed that he couldn’t ask inmate workers or his staff to handle the dirty and potentially hazardous job.

The inmate continued to cause trouble in the other cell — which he occupies alone — and again smeared the walls with his feces. He also caused the toilet to overflow and the “poop water” ran into a neighboring cell and even dripped through the floor into the cells below, Garden said.

The man hurt his hand by incessantly beating on the toilet all night long and had to be taken to the emergency room at Whidbey General Hospital.

At the hospital, the inmate head-butted a corrections deputy and bit Garden on the leg during the ensuing wrestling match in the middle of the ER floor.

The jail hired an advanced registered nurse practitioner who has a degree that allows her to prescribe psychiatric medicine to inmates. But that doesn’t help if the inmate refuses to take the medication, a not-uncommon occurrence in the mentally ill population.

Garden said the jail can’t legally force inmates to take medication. Even if the law changed, jail staff isn’t trained for force-feeding drugs.

The feces has been cleaned from the walls of the inmate’s cell many times, Garden said, but the man immediately “carpets the walls” again. The new tactic is to offer the man supplies to clean up the mess, but the staff has stopped scrubbing the walls.

That means the troubled man may be living in the stench of his own waste for weeks to come.