A reader alerted us to an excellent article that appeared in March in the Missoula Independent under the headline “For the Mentally Ill Behind Bars in Montana, Life Goes from Bad to Worse.” This long article tracks the stories of several young men who landed in prison–and ultimately, in the hole–due to their erratic and sometimes violent behavior while living with mental illness. One of those stories begins this way:
Colton Wilson has a tombstone tattooed on his right forearm. On a recent late-winter day, the 21-year-old moves constantly inside the visitor center at Shelby’s Crossroads Correctional Facility. He picks at his fingers, clenches his hands and shifts his feet. He runs his hands through his dark, wavy hair.
The worst part of prison, he says, is being put in administrative segregation. Wilson and the other inmates call it “the hole.”
“There’s no distraction, it’s just you and the walls, everything goes through your mind,” Wilson says. “Some people it doesn’t affect very badly…But it’s hard for me.”
Wilson’s always had a hard time taking direction. That’s why he lands in the hole.
In 2005, he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity and bipolar disorders. “I flipped out,” he recalls.
His parents hospitalized him after he threatened to kill himself. Psychiatrists put him on a series of medications that made him tired, incoherent and, sometimes, more angry.
He stopped taking the prescribed medications. In March 2007, Wilson, then 16, was caught with his girlfriend robbing vehicles in his hometown of Charlo. Witnesses tried to apprehend them. Wilson stabbed a man in the neck.
Prosecutors in Lake County charged Wilson with felony assault with a weapon. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a 90-day boot camp overseen by the Montana Department of Corrections and a six-year deferred sentence.
At this point, it would be easy to write off Wilson’s story as typical: A messed-up kid screws up, hurts someone and gets put away, for his own good and others’. Yet it’s what happens next, not just to Wilson but to many others like him, that raises some eyebrows about the fate of people with severe psychiatric problems in Montana’s jails and prisons.
During the past three decades, as state psychiatric hospitals have curbed services, prisons have become home to a record number of mentally ill people. Of the 2,490 people in custody with the Montana DOC, 703, or 28 percent, are taking psychotropic medications.
Experts say prisons and jails simply aren’t equipped to handle people with severe mental illness. Many contend that Wilson and other such inmates actually get worse in prison, leaving communities to foot an even larger tab for jails and hospitals. It also leaves people like Wilson more likely to commit another crime.
In the months before Colton Wilson was slated to attend boot camp at the Treasure State Correctional Training Center, in 2009, he was prescribed three drugs: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer; Abilify, an antipsychotic; and Vyvanse, a stimulant.
The drugs worked. His mother, who had always gone out of her way to fend off her son’s mood swings and paralyzing fear, was shocked. “It took almost a year and a half to get all of the pieces of the puzzle put together,” Donna Wilson says. “Once we got to that point—night and day difference with this kid.”
The judge who presided over Colton’s case ordered that he take the medications while at Treasure State. Colton’s nurse practitioner warned boot camp staff that Colton wouldn’t make it through the Training Center if he didn’t stay on the medications.
Colton’s mother filled his backpack with family photos, a Bible and his prescriptions. The family drove Colton to Missoula. He was then transported to the camp, at Deer Lodge. Colton remembers that day. “They grabbed my meds and my Bible and shackled me up and we hit the road,” he says.
In a lawsuit filed in February against the Treasure State Correctional Training Center, the DOC and the state, the family argues that Treasure State employees withheld Colton’s medications for nearly a week.
The suit alleges that six days after Colton arrived at Treasure State, DOC psychiatrist Dr. David Schaefer prescribed Abilify but didn’t approve the other drugs.
Schaefer did not respond to the Independent’s request for comment. The DOC, citing pending litigation, declined to comment on the specifics of Colton’s case.
Colton again became combative. He called the guards names. His behavior got him kicked out of boot camp and a subsequent DOC program. The court rescinded his plea deal and he was re-sentenced to 20 years in DOC custody, with 15 suspended.
The Wilsons’ suit contends that the DOC’s failure to provide prescribed medications for Colton violated his constitutional right to receive adequate medical care while incarcerated. “It’s just like if you have someone who’s a diabetic…and they need insulin, it’s a serious medical condition,” says Colton’s Missoula attorney, Terance P. Perry, of Datsopolous, MacDonald & Lind.
Colton would not be incarcerated today had he been given his medication, his family argues.
His case is similar to those in two other lawsuits filed since 2000, which allege that mentally ill inmates were punished with increasing severity because they didn’t receive proper mental health treatment…
The problem, says National Association on Mental Illness Montana Executive Director Matt Kuntz, is that prisons are designed to curb the bad behavior of rational people. The premise may seem simple: Behave, and you don’t get in trouble. But people with serious mental illness don’t always think rationally. There’s a tendency to act out, which, in a prison setting, can lead to progressively harsher punishments.
“They commit crimes for different reasons than people who don’t have serious mental illnesses,” Kuntz says. “It’s a disruption of neural circuits. That affects how they think, feel and act.”
Kuntz says stories like Wilson’s and those of other Montana inmates reflect a system that’s ill equipped to handle the complexities of mental illness. “As long as the prisons are a place that we rely on to house our mentally ill, the Department of Corrections is going to fail,” he observes. “It’s like asking someone to hold water with a strainer—they don’t have the right tools…Eventually somebody, and maybe it’s going to be the Wilsons, is going to make the state of Montana pay for it.”
The article, by Jessica Mayrer, continues with a brief history of how society has dealt with psychiatric disabilities, culminating in the de-institutionalization–and widespread criminalization–of the mentally ill. “In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed available for every 300 Americans,” Mayrer points out. “Today, that number is one per 3,000. Warm Springs State Hospital in Montana housed 1,890 people in 1954. Roughly 200 are treated there today. The state’s population during that same period grew by more than 400,000.”
The piece goes on to tell the stories of two suicidal inmates whose “treatment” consisted of being placed alone in a bare cell without a mattress or clothing. The courts intervened in both these cases, but the practice–which the Montana State Prison classifies as a “Behavior Management Plan”–continues. Efforts to improve mental health care in Montana’s prisons have been restrained by lack of funding and concerns for “security.”
You can read the full article here.
Criminalizing Mental Illness: The Story of Adam Hall
When he was five years old, Adam Hall tried to burn down his family home outside Utica in upstate New York. Afterwards, he drew a picture of his family having a happy reunion in heaven. Adam’s mother, Carole Hall, knew the incident was a cry for help–and possibly an early suicide attempt–but she had no money to get Adam decent treatment. Through the rest of his childhood, the boy would be in and out of psychiatric institutions and group homes. Carole Hall says he was molested in two of them, but never effectively treated for what would eventually be diagnosed as a panoply of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder.
What happened next is all too typical of what happens to young people with untreated psychiatric disabilities in New York and throughout the United States, in an era when psychiatric hospitals have closed and jails and prisons have become the default inpatient facilities for the nation’s mentally ill. Adam Hall ended up in prison for a relatively minor felony, then in solitary confinement. Before long, he would have years added to his sentence for offenses committed in prison–offenses once again stemming from his mental illness. If the pattern continues, he could end up spending decades behind bars.
Hall’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior got him in trouble with the law while he was still a teenager. By the time he was 22, in 2009, he had been convicted of assault after stealing a car and resisting arrest. Sentenced to three years, he joined the estimated 5,000 or more prisoners in New York State’s prison who are suffering from mental illness.
According to correspondence with Adam Hall and interviews with his mother, he bounced around the prison system for a while. And like many people with mental illness, he quickly got in trouble for breaking prison rules and was disciplined by being placed in lockdown. A 2003 report by New York’s Correctional Association found that while inmates diagnosed with mental illness made up 11 percent of the state’s overall prison population, they constituted nearly a quarter of the inmates in isolated confinement in the state’s Special Housing Units (SHUs). Many of the SHU prisoners the CA interviewed for the report were “actively psychotic, manic, paranoid or seemingly overmedicated.”
Eventually Hall landed in the Residential Mental Health Unit (RMHU) at Marcy State Correctional Facility. The RMHU is considered an alternative to long-term solitary confinement for difficult to control prisoners with mental illness. In these units, inmates are locked down for much of the day, but receive they a greater measure of out-of-cell time and mental health treatment. Recent litigation and 2008’s so-called SHU Exclusion Law were designed to reduce the population of mentally ill inmates in solitary, in part by increasing the number of RMHU beds. And considering the alternatives, it was probably the best placement available to Adam Hall within the prison system.
But Adam Hall remained unstable and suicidal, and in 2011 he attempted to kill himself the same way he had when he was five: he set fire to his RMHU cell. Prison officials had the option to treat the incident as a symptom of Hall’s mental illness, and address it through internal disciplinary and classification processes. Instead, they chose to send Hall’s case to a grand jury in Utica, where he was indicted for arson. Facing up to 25 years, Hall let his public defender enter a guilty plea to third-degree arson, and was sentenced to three to six additional years in prison.
Hall was shipped to another RMHU, this one in Attica, where he remains today. The Department of Corrections has charged him for damages to his cell totaling more than $4,000, which he cannot pay. Because of his debts to the prison, his mother says, any money sent to him to buy food and sundries from the canteen is requisitioned by the state. Adam says he has to sell his prison food to get enough to buy postage stamps.
Adam’s situation–spelled out in a rap sheet he sent to Solitary Watch along with health records provided by his mother–appears to fly in the face of the intent of the state’s hard-won SHU exclusion law. The law is designed to protect and help mentally ill inmates who face prison disciplinary proceedings. But it leaves prison officials the option to deal with behavior problems as crimes rather than as mental health issues, and ship them out to the local DA. (Some laws, in fact, appear to have been passed for this express purpose. It is now a felony in New York, for example, to throw feces at a prison officer–and offense that is committed almost exclusively by mentally ill inmates in the SHU, as well as those driven mad by solitary.)
“The part that bothers me,’’ said one attorney with experience representing prisoners, “is: why did DOCCS refer this particular case to the DA for outside prosecution? We don’t have a lot of info, but it appears that if he did have a discipline hearing for this incident it was dismissed, and it may have been dismissed because of his mental health. That they would refer for outside prosecution a case that does not even warrant internal discipline is quite troubling. However, I know of no law that applies. As far as I know, DOCCS simply has discretion to refer cases to local DAs.”
Another attorney who defends prisoners’ rights confirmed that “many disciplinary tickets are written for incidents that could be charged as crimes. If the DOCCS determines to handle it through the prison system, then there is no criminal case. DOCCS does call in the DA for some incidents–this is a discretionary decision.” Under the SHU exclusion law, if the incident is dealt with inside the prison system, “New York State regulations “require that mental health is taken into consideration for the purpose of mitigation and possible dismissal of infractions under certain circumstances. Those regulations are pretty much going to be in effect for anyone who is in an RMHU–meaning that for all disciplinary hearings arising out of incidents in an RMHU, it is likely that the regulations require mental health testimony at the hearing and consideration of mental illness in the disposition.” But if the case is kicked to the local DA–no such protections apply.
She continues: “If the incident is related to his mental illness, the lack of adequate treatment for that illness, and his inability to conform to the prison environment due to his illness–isn’t charging him with a crime the ultimate criminalization of the status of his having mental illness? What purpose does the criminal case serve if these are the facts? It isn’t deterrence or rehabilitation–it appears to solely be retribution–is that a sufficient purpose?”
When we described this case to a veteran former New York State corrections officer, he said people like Hall were often doomed from the moment they arrived in prison, if not before. They tended to rack up small felony charges, one after the other, so that they effectively served a life sentence, shut away out of sight in some form of solitary confinement.
In a letter written on April 9, 2012, Hall said: “It’s hard in here for me. I feel like killing myself most of the time like I said but end up cutting myself to relieve the pain or just do things that help me relieve pain. Cutting myself seems the best way but one day I’m going to really cut myself and not tell no one so I can bleed out. That’s how I am feeling nowadays. My life’s gone down the drain.”
The Buffalo office of Prisoner Legal Services of New York, the small but tenacious nonprofit that acts on behalf of inmates in state prisons, sent a letter to Attica asking the mental health unit to look into the situation. Hall wrote both his mother and us that he was making deeper cuts in his arms, cutting into the muscle, building up to a final suicide slitting. On the advice of Prisoner Legal Services, Carole Hall phoned the head of the mental health unit at Attica and told him about the threats. He told Hall he knew nothing about the case but assured her he would look into it.
Whether Hall is alive or dead, whether he has gotten better treatment or simply had his possessions removed and been thrown nearly naked into a suicide cell, his mother doesn’t know.
Mothers with Sons in Solitary Tell Their Stories
In the run-up to Mother’s Day, the ACLU has unrolled a new feature on its website, called “Justice Mamas.” In it, a series of mothers talk honestly and movingly about what it is like to have a beloved son behind bars and in solitary confinement.
The sons themselves represent a cross-section of the kinds of prisoners who are in solitary confinement in American prisons and jails today: One is a juvenile who is in and out of solitary for minor offenses. Another suffers from mental illness and is routinely placed in isolation instead of receiving the treatment he needs. Another has been “validated” as a gang member, and is in his twelfth year of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay.
Together, they offer a sense of how solitary confinement–even more than other forms of incarceration–tears families apart and keeps prisoners separated from what is often one of the only positive forces in their lives–their mothers.
Check out the Justice Mamas page here, and the ACLU’s Stop Solitary project here.
A new report produced by researchers at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs describes conditions faced by children who are “certified” for transfer to adult criminal justice system. Many of these juveniles are housed in adult jails in Texas while they await trial. The report finds that the majority of youth placed in adult jails are housed in solitary confinement, most with just one hour of out-of-cell time per day. While they are placed in isolation for their own protection, they live in conditions that mirror punitive segregation, and often remain there for months or even years.
“When making housing decisions,” the report states, ”jails are forced to choose between protecting the mental health or physical safety of a juvenile.” If they are placed among adult prisoners, they are at high risk of physical and sexual assault. If they are instead placed in solitary, it is their mental health that’s most at risk–and the damage may be permanent.
The report, titled Conditions for Certified Juveniles in Texas County Jails, surveyed 41 jails, which in the course of 2010 housed well over a hundred juveniles who had been accused of a crime, but not yet convicted. ”Given the broad range of physical risks to youth who are commingled with adult offenders,” the report found, ”the majority of jails surveyed chose to house juveniles in isolation cells. Although these jails are making efforts to protect the physical safety of the juveniles in their custody, this isolation has its own risks.”
It can have a detrimental impact on the juvenile’s mental health, aggravating existing mental illness and augmenting suicidal ideation. Segregation may hurt adolescents’ chance for proper socialization and damage their ability to develop a healthy adult identity. This reduction in socialization and impairment to identity formation may limit the possibility for future mental health recovery.
Even short periods of isolation can produce symptoms of paranoia, anxiety, and depression. In fact, “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” The harm caused by isolation does not end at release; prolonged or permanent psychiatric disability may occur, including impairments that seriously reduce the inmate’s capacity to reintegrate into the broader community upon release from detention. Amnesty International has condemned the practice of placing youths in isolation, finding that it both violates international law and is particularly damaging to “children and adolescents, who are not yet fully developed physically and emotionally and are less equipped to tolerate the effects of isolation.”
It is worth noting that certified youth in county jails have not been convicted of any crime, and are merely awaiting hearings or trials on their charges. They must be presumed innocent. Some of these youth will have their cases dismissed; some will be given probation; and others will be given time-served or short sentences. Despite the speed with which these youth may re-enter the community, the effects of detention may be severe. For example, the impact of prolonged isolation may have mental health consequences that will make it difficult for these youth to reintegrate, and may increase the likelihood that they will recidivate…
National research indicates that juveniles held in adult jails have by far the highest suicide rate of any age group in adult jails. Additionally, national data shows that juveniles in adult facilities are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than their counterparts in a juvenile detention facility. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for every suicide committed by young adults (not specifically incarcerated youths) between the ages of 15 and 24, there were between 100- 200 attempts. This is significant, as the likelihood a youth will harm himself or herself in adult jail is exponentially increased from the already heightened suicide rates for juveniles in adult facilities. Given the significantly increased risk of suicide, self-harm, and aggravation of mental health issues, the choice to separate juveniles from adults only trades physical safety for mental health risks…
There is no good option for the jail administrators who are confronting this challenge. In contrast, juvenile detention centers do not have to make this choice between a youth’s physical safety and mental health, because they have the capacity to house youth with other youth.
For personal stories of children in solitary in adult jails in Texas, see the award winning article “For Their Own Good,” which appeared in the Houston Press in 2010.
Last week we wrote about a trial beginning in Federal District Court in Denver, in which Troy Anderson, a prisoner with mental illness, is challenging his twelve years of solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary. The lawsuit, filed by student lawyers at the University of Denver Law School’s Civil Right Clinic, could have broad significance because it argues that the long-term isolation of mentally ill prisoners as it is practiced at CSP violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the Constitution’s guarantee of due process and its ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The always excellent Alan Prendergast, who writes for Denver’s Westword and has been following Troy Anderson and his lawsuit for years, is covering the trial, and yesterday provided a detailed report on what seems to shaping up as a promising case for the plaintiffs–and for all opponents of long-term solitary.
After nearly five days of testimony in a lawsuit brought by Troy Anderson, a prisoner who’s been in solitary confinement for twelve years, a Denver federal judge was strongly urging Colorado Department of Corrections officials to fix the harshest conditions at the state’s supermax prison — before he has to do it for them. “It shouldn’t take a federal judge to write an opinion and embarrass the department in the public eye to get this accomplished,” U.S. District Brooke Jackson said.
Jackson’s remarks, suggesting that there might have to be some drastic changes in the way the Colorado State Penitentiary operates, came midway through testimony in the case brought by Anderson, a state inmate serving what amounts to a life sentence for charges from two shootouts with police in the late 1990s. Anderson, who’s been diagnosed with mental illnesses ranging from ADHD to “intermittent explosive disorder,” has been confined at CSP since 2000 — deprived of direct sunlight or outdoor recreation, books (he’s allowed two a year), and, he claims, the medications that might actually help him control his behavior, reduce his sentence and get him placed back int the general prison population…
Anderson’s attorneys contend that the supermax fails to provide adequate treatment for mentally ill inmates — who, deprived of medication, exercise and socialization, deteriorate in solitary confinement. Inmates can also receive negative write-ups, or “chrons,” from guards that help keep them in segregation, even though they have no opportunity to contest the information.
The article–which needs to be read in full–reports on testimony by other CSP prisoners–delivered remotely by video–and by former CSP warden Susan Jones, who insisted that Anderson was where he belonged, .
Breaking into an unusual colloquy with Jones when she was on the stand, Jackson said he was troubled by the lack of meaningful administrative review and the absence of due process in the use of negative “chrons” to keep inmates in solitary for years. “It doesn’t seem fair to me,” he declared. And some of the other conditions described by inmates, if true, were clearly “inhumane” in his view.
The trial is expected to end next week, but it may be several weeks before the judge hands down his ruling. You can follow Alan Prendergast’s reporting here.
Today’s Advocate has an excellent article by Andrew Harmon, dissecting the abuses faced by transgender detainees in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities. It begins with the story of a transgender woman who spent eight months in solitary confinement in a Virginia jail:
A few days after Christmas last year, Ruby Corado, a longtime transgender activist in Washington, D.C., received a telephone call while watching late-night TV. The number on her iPhone was from Rappahannock Regional Jail, about an hour’s drive south of the nation’s capital in Stafford, Va. Rappahannock is one of more than 200 facilities nationwide that contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house those awaiting a judge’s decision on whether they can remain in the United States or will be deported back to their home country. On any given day, about 32,000 people are held in detention, many for violating immigration law — a civil, not criminal, offense.
Weak and distraught, the transgender woman calling Corado at 11 p.m from Rappahannock was one of them. Her name was Kripcia, and she had been held for eight months in what ICE calls “administrative segregation” — solitary confinement, in non-bureaucratic terms. A native of El Salvador, she was arrested in early 2011 for failure to pay a cab.
Kripcia had spent a minimum 22 hours per day in a tiny cell with little access to recreation or other people. This was not because she had defied any jail rules: It was for her own good, for her safety, she was told by officers. Kripcia’s cell was located in a special unit of the jail usually reserved for male sex offenders. She was told that it would be easier for guards to watch over her in this smaller area…
Ruby, I just want to die. I’m going crazy, Kripcia told Corado on the phone that evening. But if I have to die, I want to go back to my country. I can’t die in here.
Promise me you’re not going to think those thoughts, Corado replied. Come on, work with me on this. Promise me. Just give it one more day.
“It’s hard, you know? What do I really tell these people in detention?” Corado said through tears during a recent conversation at Casa Ruby, her soon-to-open Latino LGBT community center near Howard University. “Segregation is inhuman. And how they’re treated, how they’re abused? It’s inexcusable. Even if they’ve done something wrong, you want the best for these people. But I’ve never seen a case of a transgender detainee who was actually treated like a human being.”
The article goes on to describe how transgender immigrants like Kripcia are among the worst victims of a ”turf war” going on between the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security (which includes ICE), under which DHS insists it is not bound by laws and regulations concerning the treatment of federal prisoners. Key among these laws is the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which is meant to address the epidemic of sexual assaults in U.S. prisons. Prison rape, like solitary, disproportionately affects transgender inmates.
The article is well worth reading in full, and details the efforts of advocates–even the new Public Advocate within ICE–to keep solitary confinement from being the “default position” when it comes to dealing with transgender detainees. The piece ends with another story of isolation:
Rosalba Davis [of the group Immigration Equality]…worked with a transgender woman named Dulce from Guanajuato, Mexico, who originally fled to the U.S. in the 1990s following a sexual assault. Dulce has the effervescence of an Almodóvar film actress, yet is shy when speaking about her time in detention. She had been transferred to Rappahannock following an arrest for shoplifting shoes at a local K-Mart. Upon arrival, Dulce was put into an isolation cell (el hoyo, or “the hole”) for six days with nothing but a pair of sheets and a thin, wet mattress thrown onto the floor. “I remember asking a female sergeant, ‘Why did you put me here, in the hole? It’s the place for punishment. What did I do?’” Dulce recalled. “She told me they didn’t know where else they could put me.”
Dulce was transferred to the same area that Kripcia had been held, the one designated for male sex offenders. She waited four months before her first court appearance and eventually spent eight months at the facility. CAIR Coalition, a local immigrant advocacy group, found out about Dulce’s case, which was soon taken up by Davis. “When I found out that Dulce was being held with sex offenders, I was not sure what to do about it,” she said. “It all seemed so backwards to me.”
Dulce had little interaction with her fellow detainees, but some conversations she did have scared her, as she recounted to the court last year. “I have not felt safe here and several detainees have made harassing comments,” she wrote. “When New York State passed gay marriage in July [2011], we were watching the TV coverage and one of the detainees said that he wanted to be like Franco and make them all ‘disappear.’ He was telling me he wanted to kill all the gay people, including me. I try to ignore these comments and keep the peace but sometimes I feel unsafe and scared here.”
The officer handling Dulce’s case seemed perpetually confused about her particular circumstances, according to Davis. “Over the course of my representation, he had very little patience,” Davis said of the ICE officer and his handling of Dulce’s requests, which included hormone therapy and a chaplain visit after Dulce learned that her mother had died (both were denied). “He even hung up on me once when I challenged his decision to continue to detain her after the immigration court granted her relief.”…
Absent safe facilities for transgender individuals, advocates have called for alternatives to detention in appropriate cases. Research shows that putting trans detainees on ankle bracelet monitoring results in significant savings for the government — $14 per day compared to $100 or more a day for the cost of detention, according to Homeland Security’s own figures.
“Nobody should be subjected to these kinds of abuses, and people need to hear these stories,” said Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality. “I think there has been an increasing meanness in our country toward people who are undocumented. Unfortunately, that’s certainly had an effect on the progress we have and haven’t made in securing better treatment in detention.”
Children in Solitary
This week, the The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry released a policy statement condemning the use of solitary confinement for juveniles. There is no comprehensive data on how many teens and even younger children are in solitary confinement in the United States, but it is safe to say that the number run into the thousands. Juveniles in adult prison often end up in solitary confinement, and isolation is widely used in juvenile facilities as well.
On the ACLU “Blog of Rights” today, David Fathi, Director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, puts the statement in context:
As any parent knows, teenagers are different than adults. This common-sense observation is backed by hard scientific evidence; we know that an adolescent’s brain continues to grow and develop well into his or her twenties. The fact that teenagers’ brains are still developing makes them especially vulnerable to trauma of all kinds, including the trauma of social isolation and sensory deprivation.
That’s why the leading American child psychiatry association just approved a policy statement opposing the use of solitary confinement in correctional facilities for juveniles. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry represents over 7,500 child and adolescent psychiatrists and other interested physicians.
This groundbreaking policy statement from adolescent psychiatry experts comes not a moment too soon. While recent settlements in ACLU lawsuits in Montana and Mississippi include limits on solitary confinement for youth, the practice remains alarmingly widespread, with thousands of persons under 18 held in solitary on any given day, in juvenile facilities as well as in adult jails and prisons. I remember the first time I visited a 13-year-old boy in solitary in an adult prison – his voice hadn’t changed yet and he was too young to shave, but that didn’t save him from being locked alone in a cell for 23 hours a day.
Solitary confinement can be harmful for people of any age, but it’s especially damaging to youth. The 17-year-old plaintiff in the ACLU’s Montana case tried to kill himself several times while in solitary confinement in an adult prison. And while youth in solitary are a relatively small percentage of the total population of juvenile facilities, they account for more than half of the suicides.
Fortunately efforts are underway to end this inhumane and destructive practice. In California, Sen. Leland Yee introduced a bill to ban solitary confinement for juveniles except in the most exceptional circumstances. The bill attracted considerable support, but eventually failed to pass out of committee. And in West Virginia, the Division of Juvenile Services recently announced a state-wide ban on the practice.
Click here to read the rest, and to sign the ACLU’s petition against solitary confinement.
Prisoners in California’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) have offered their opinions of the recent reforms of the California prison system’s controversial gang validation policies. In correspondences with Solitary Watch, SHU inmates in Pelican Bay and Corcoran prisons have consistently been critical of the reforms, which among other things reform the gang validation point system and introduce a step-down program in which inmates can transition out of the SHU. Last month a group of SHU inmates, all of whom are labeled as either members or leaders of prison gangs (Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerilla Family), released a counter proposal in response.
The following are excerpts from letters written by prisoners currently in California’s SHUs.
From Kijana Askari (self-portrait above), who has been in the SHU since 1994 after being validated as a member of the Black Guerilla Family:
With regards to the revisions that were done to SHU management gang policies, well, that is exactly what has taken place—”revisions” (e.g. “reform”). Hence, more of the same in that, the revisions have only strengthened CDCR officials power and ability to label and validate every prisoner in CDCR as belonging to a Security Threat Group–e.g. “prison gang.”At the crux of the revisions is a lack of a definitive and “behavioral-based” criteria, as to what actually constitute as being gang activity. Meaning, any and everything can and will still be considered as gang activity, in spite of how innocuous the activity may be.
In addition to this, we still have untrained and unqualified CDCR officers/officials determining and assessing what is “gang activity.” And this point is critical for two very important reasons: 1) There are no qualitative oversight mechanisms in place, meaning there is absolutely nothing to prevent CDCR’s prison guards, gang unit, etc., from being vindictive, retaliatory, punitive, etc., via the application of these “revised” gang management policies; and 2) it has been proven that CDCR’s prison guards and their IGI gang unit staff do not properly investigate the evidence used in each prisoners gang validation–see Lira v. Cate.
And the new revisions do not do anything to correct this.
Kijana Tashiri Askari (Marcus Harrison) #H54077, Pelican Bay State Prison D3 122 SHU, PO Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95531
From a Pelican Bay SHU inmate who has been in solitary confinement for five years and is currently appealing the gang validation that placed him there:
“We were recently afforded a copy of this proposal. Many of us are getting the chance now to read through and evaluate it. I read through it once and will go through it again. There are many aspects of the step down program that at face value seem to provide far better alternatives to the over 20 year long policy of implementing indeterminate SHU programs. Many of the program objectives and privileges outlined in the proposal at first glance look to be very good and beneficial to a lot of SHU prisoners. However, the gang validation/identification aspect of the proposal continues to present an ongoing issue and problem for many individuals who have been validated and will be validated. Under the criteria that is set forth, it continues to target and identify individuals for long-term SHU placement based on gang affiliation rather than actual gang activity or criminal/illegal conduct.”Which is, has been, and under this proposal will continue to be a significant hardship for many who the CDCR looks to place and keep locked away in the SHU for little to no reason.”
From a Corcoran SHU inmate who has been diagnosed with severe depression:
“We did have an opportunity to see and speak to a couple of representatives from Sacramento who are responsible for crafting language that will reflect the policy change. As we understand there are changes being made to the policy. And the CDCR is in the process of implementing the step down program here at Corcoran SHU. And it is anticipated, according to what we were told, that something would be in place within 60-90 days. At least that’s a target date or time frame.
There was a couple of areas of concern for us. We believe that four years is much too long to be in the step down program. It’s a four year step program, each step is one year. It’s basically an observation program in which you graduate to the next step if you have not been documented as having been involved in gang activity. Just what constitutes gang activity is still being determined.
A lot of guys in Pelican Bay and here have already been in isolation for the past 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 years. Many have been disciplinary free and most were placed in isolation for non-disciplinary reasons. It does not make any sense for guys to have to remain in the SHU.
We believe that those guys that the CDCR (genuinely) intends on placing in general population or non-SHU setting should be placed directly into one.
In light of the struggle (and loss of life) it will be extremely difficult for the CDCR to justify not allowing guys to be released to general population. Or at least be provided some kind of meaningful program in a non-SHU setting.
I was diagnosed with severe depression several years ago.
I don’t know which is worse.
At some point you know that the isolation has affected you. Perhaps permanently. It involves so many different factors. Particularly the isolation itself.
Over the years you have seen other people snap. Human beings cutting themselves. Eating their own waste. Smearing themselves in it. And sometimes throwing it at you. Human beings not just talking out loud to themselves–but screaming at and cursing themselves out.
How could you not be affected by this kind of madness?!”
From a Pelican Bay SHU inmate who has been in solitary confinement since 1988, and participated in the 2011 hunger strikes:
“I fail to see how it is any different from my current SHU term…It did not address the fact that there are prisoners who have been in PBSP-SHU for over 20 years without any kind of serious rule infraction. It is written like every single short corridor prisoner is starting from scratch. In other words, no prisoner should even entertain the idea of leaving SHU for the next four or five years. It sounds like a poorly modified version of the six year inactive status program to me. And the IGI still has control of prisoners’ fate through what is decided through classification, telling them when and where to place us.
Nothing has been gained–they’ve put a different name on the same repressive/torturous measures that have been in effect since the state started locking us up for administrative convenience in extreme solitary confinement isolation. There is absolutely nothing about the step down program that allows a SHU prisoner to work their way out of SHU without the expressed approval of the IGI–the whole program as laid out at present is a bunch of clever words seemingly giving prisoners a way to work our way out of SHU. It’s not! I’ve already been in SHU since 1988, what do I need to work on? What exactly are they going to see in my attitude and actions during the four phases of the step-down program that they haven’t already seen in the past twenty plus years during my extreme isolated confinement for administrative convenience? It just does not make sense.
I feel like the CDCR is clowning us!”
The following is from a Pelican Bay SHU inmate who has been incarcerated for forty years, 35 of which have been spent in the SHU.
“Being a labeled outcast makes it easy to see us no more than a farm animal or dog. Which morally assuages the conscience and culpability of individuals’ roles in our vilification. We are living in the times of the Bogeyman syndrome. The power of fear and mistrust. Suspicion which clouds peoples judgment and common sense. Choosing to be ignorant, unable or unwilling to filter out irrelevant noises and views, they transform into parrots that merely mimic the latest tidbit of information.
I don’t have a positive opinion of the impending SHU policy changes. The basic framework, premise and argument is faulty because phantoms are still used as a justification to subject people to punitive action. I am in SHU for non-disciplinary reasons and have been subjected to punitive isolation based on presumption and fantastic takes sown from the chronicle of the Bogeyman. I have spent 35 years in SHU and I should be unconditionally released to the mainline, especially since I haven’t had any serious rule violation in even twenty-five years except for participation in a hunger strike.”
Solitary Confinement on Trial in Colorado
Our latest piece over at Mother Jones concerns an important trial beginning today in Federal District Court in Denver, in which a prisoner with mental illness is challenging more than a decade in solitary confinement in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Also included is background on the groundbreaking work of the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic; on the use of solitary confinement to warehouse the mentally ill; and on recent challenges to solitary in the state of Colorado. What follows is the beginning of the article; you can read the full piece on MotherJones.com.
Troy Anderson lives in Cañon City, a high desert town in a dramatic setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. But for more than a decade he has neither seen those mountains nor felt the sun on his skin. He spends 23 hours out of each day confined to an 8 x 12 isolation cell at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP)—one of the state’s supermax prisons—and the remaining hour in a bare exercise room. Well over half of his 42 years have been spent behind bars, most of them in what prison authorities euphemistically call “administrative segregation.” In practice, this means Anderson will remain in solitary confinement until prison officials feel it’s time to let him out.
Anderson has been in and out of jail since he was a juvenile on account of his erratic and sometimes violent behavior. In 2000, he was sentenced to 75 years for myriad charges stemming from two incidents in which he shot at police, the second time in an attempt to escape custody. Offenses committed in prison have landed him in “ad seg” at CSP. (His last disciplinary infraction was in 2005, when he was written up for somehow managing to get envelopes to another prisoner.)
But there’s more to the story. Anderson, like hundreds of other prisoners confined in isolation in Colorado—and thousands held in solitary across the nation—is seriously mentally ill. His diagnoses include bipolar disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, cognitive disorders, and a seizure disorder. He has attempted suicide many times, starting at age 10. He is seen periodically by prison psychiatrists, all of whom seem to concur that he needs therapy and medication. At CSP, however, his treatment has consisted of a fiasco of intermittent and inappropriate meds and scant therapy, typically conducted through a slot in his solid steel cell door.
Yet unlike most of those other prisoners languishing in solitary, Anderson is about to get his day in federal court. Beginning today, in a trial that could have broad implications for how states handle inmates with mental illness, Anderson’s lawyers will argue before the District Court in Denver that their client’s predicament violates his civil rights, under both the Constitution and federal law.
It was his untreated mental illness that first landed him at CSP, Anderson contends, and now the same symptoms are keeping him there indefinitely. Without proper treatment, he is unable to convince corrections officials that he’s fit for the general prison population. This Catch-22, his lawyers say, condemns him to an effective life sentence under conditions that are increasingly being denounced as a form of torture—particularly when applied to mentally ill prisoners.
Read the rest here.
Voices from Solitary: Waking Nightmares
Incarcerated for over 17 years, “Mysterious Offender” (M.O.) has spent over 16 of those years in isolation units in Oregon, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Corresponding with Solitary Watch for nearly 4 months, he has recounted his 12-year incarceration in Oregon’s isolation units. He has said he suffers “significant impairment from isolation.” The following is a portion of a series of writings entitled “Exiled in Purgatory.” — Sal Rodriguez
Waking Nightmares
In 2009 I had been in prison for 15 years. My attorney hired a nationally well-known expert to examine me and determine how I had adjusted to incarceration. He gave me 34 tests, over three days, many of which can detect the faking of mental health disorders. He concluded I suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He stated in his written report:
“Further witnessing several murders, suicides, and general mayhem before and after his incarceration likely exacerbated his pre-existing PTSD symptomatology. His PTSD appears to be chronic from the TSI data.” [SW note: The TSI is the Trauma Symptom Inventory.]
I’ve since learned, from other prison psychiatrists that PTSD is common in prisoners who have spent many years incarcerated. It is akin to serving several tours in a war zone. People become hypersensitive and you can literally feel the stress and tension on people. I’ve known it for years but didn’t know it was PTSD.
I startle easily. If a pen rolls off my desk and hits the floor…even that small sound can throw me into fear. If the officer knocks on the cell door or shuts the cuff port hard, a door slams, an odd sound…every one of them can throw me into fear. I can only describe the fear as being of of body. I have recurring nightmares.
Does the prison provide treatment? Aside from wanting to put you on medication, No. They tell me if I need treatment I have to tell them what I need…and chances are they don’t have it.
I have to wonder why the US continues down the path of failing prisons that they know makes people worse, then sends them back into the world none the better.
I constantly worry how I will function in general population, let alone the free world. The U.S. has more prisoners than any other nation on earth. Why is that? Why is the “land of the free” also the “land of prisoners”?
