A jailed Chicago teen who ingested screws, needles and other metal objects has racked up more than $1 million in medical fees, the New York Daily News reported.

Seventeen-year-old Lamont Cathey is "literally eating" her facility, Cara Smith, the executive director of the Cook County Jail, told the Chicago Tribune.

"This case, to me, is a perfect example of the failure of the criminal-justice system," she said. "It's been a crushingly sad and very frustrating case," Smith added.

Cathey was unable to post a $5,000 cash bond after he was arrested for allegedly stealing money from a pizzeria safe, according to The Associated Press. The teenager has been in jail for 16 months, a time during which he has been hospitalized two dozen times and has had several operations to remove objects from his digestive tract.

The inmate's lawyers have said in court filings that Cathey urgently needs psychiatric treatment, though his brother, Kenneth Barber, said he had never displayed signs of depression before he was jailed, the newswire noted.

"Lamont requires structured, long-term psychiatric residential treatment," one of the defense filings detailed.

The Cook County Jail "has long been a dumping ground for the mentally ill," the Chicago Tribune lamented, blaming "widespread cuts" in mental-health services at the city, county and state levels over the last decades.

Cathey's case is not atypical as many of the facility's inmates are locked up on relatively minor charges because they do not have the money to post small bonds, the newspaper explained. Given that the teenager is accused of having shoved a guard, his fate might eventually include time in state prison, the AP added.

Nneka Jones Tapia, a clinical psychologist who is set to become the Cook County Jail's new executive director, told the Chicago Tribune that 6-foot-8-inch former basketball player has gone through an ordeal while imprisoned.

"He was a young kid coming into our custody, an impressionable young man," he said. "And he has taken on probably every negative behavior he has seen others exemplify," Jones Tapia added.