Fourteen inmates at the Lancaster County jail are stuck in a waiting period, ready for a bed at the Lincoln Regional Center. While they wait for a bed, their cases are put on pause, too.
Commonly known as the LRC, the regional center is one of the two public psychiatric hospitals in Nebraska. The facility has 240 beds. The other facility is just a little over two hours away in Norfolk, with a capacity of 114. Both hospitals treat issues such as general psychiatric service, forensic psychiatric service and sexually deviant behavior.
The high wait times come at a time when the Lancaster County jail has seen overcrowding issues over the past few years. A 2025 criminal justice system assessment from Lancaster Community Corrections found that the facility was at 112% of operational capacity based on the average daily population between 2024 and 2025.
For those 14 in county jail, once they’ve completed a competency evaluation, their cases are “essentially frozen,” said Lancaster County Corrections Director Brad Johnson.
“These cases just get placed on hold so the case doesn’t move, process, they don’t go to court. Everything comes to a standstill until they’re restored to competency,” Johnson said.
The average wait time for those in the county jail was at 76 days in March. That’s a 280% increase compared with the 20-day wait at the same time last year. The lowest wait times Lancaster County has seen for beds at the LRC was 10 days in June 2024.
There’s also an average of 94 days from the time a judge finds an individual incompetent and orders them to the regional center until the day a bed comes available and corrections could transport them to the facility. That’s a number that’s spiked in the past year. Back in March 2025, that number was down to 26 days – the lowest it’s been since March 2022.
Johnson said he currently has around 10 individuals at the regional center and around seven waiting to be evaluated, in addition to the 14 who are waiting for a bed. He said that’s a pretty typical breakdown of the population.
When it comes to those longer wait times, Johnson said he didn’t think the actual number of individuals who are being found not competent to stand trial has increased. Rather, he said it’s a capacity issue at the LRC.
“They’re just sitting here in the jail waiting for a bed that can, you know, help them move along. So it really bothers me that we don’t have better solutions than just putting them in a jail.”
Johnson also added that while corrections has mental health specialists to provide care during the waiting period, it isn’t a long-term solution.
“These are folks who do not function real well in a correctional facility; they really need to be in a therapeutic environment where their need can be addressed by professionals that have skill sets that are more honed towards these types of issues,” Johnson said.
Wendy Baumeister is the director of justice and behavior health integration for Region 5 Systems, a network that develops and coordinates publicly funded behavioral health services in Southeast Nebraska.
Baumeister explained that after an individual completes their competency evaluation and is found incompetent, they might wait 90 days just to get to the LRC. And depending on factors regarding care and the patient’s willingness to take medication, six months could go by with their case on hold.
“And so then it gets to that point of do the charges just get dropped because they’ve been in custody longer than what they would have been had they been found guilty,” Baumeister said.
There’s another door of entry for those waiting for the LRC. That’s on Kristin Nelson’s side, where she works as the director of emergency services for Region 5.
Her work deals with individuals found mentally ill and dangerous through the mental health board.
Nelson said there currently are 32 people who have been sent to the LRC by the mental health board, with a waitlist of eight. One of those eight has been waiting since October for a bed – another since November.
Both Nelson and Baumeister reiterated that the wait times are the longest they’ve seen in their careers in behavioral health. Nelson said the numbers crept up steadily over the past five or six years, but this year had a much bigger jump than normal.
One reason for this higher wait times, Nelson said, is long stays by existing patients at LRC. The average active length of stay was 604 days in 2025, according to DHHS.
Nelson said that reducing those stay times is a priority moving forward.
“We need to reduce the length of stay at the crisis center and getting them into treatment quicker. The other is, we need to get people into LRC, enhance the treatment there, and get them out quicker.”
Baumeister added that the issue isn’t an LRC issue, but a systemic problem.
“It’s because of the budget cuts that we’ve been seeing the past. You know, a few years ago, just changes in with the Division of Behavioral Health, the service definitions, the availability of beds in some of the aftercare programs,” Baumeister said.
Moving forward to address concerns of long wait times and longer stays, Region 5 is doing a statewide summit. The summit will focus on sequential intercept mapping, which “details how individuals with mental and substance use disorders come into contact with and move through the criminal justice system,” according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The conference will include law enforcement, judges, probation officers and behavioral health providers to address the big issues of moving people into the LRC and getting them out.
“It’s really going to be a large coming together to kind of address this issue because the reality of it is, it is what it is, you know, and how do we move forward, kind of with that piece of it?” Baumeister said.