Walking into the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center I could feel my palms getting sweaty, my heart racing, my body started shaking, an anxiety attack was creeping up. I started looking different directions figuring out how I could make a run for it, how I could stop my mind from racing, how I could get fresh air. I needed to somehow endure it; after all I was only there on a class tour. A tour that lasted one hour, but felt as if I was incarcerated for five years. I have suffered from mild anxiety since I was a child and had never thought about how it would be to be incarcerated.
Walking around the facility I imagined how mentally ill inmates deal with being incarcerated. How do individuals that suffer from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) deal with being incarcerated? But most importantly how are these individuals dealt with once incarcerated and how do they end up in jails and prisons instead of being helped. More than 1 million people who are incarcerated in the U. S suffer from a mental illness. These individuals do not receive the proper treatment while incarcerated.
Instead they are placed in facilities to fend for themselves. Many prisons do not have the proper means of dealing with mental illnesses, instead these individuals are held in solitary confinement for most of their sentence. Upon release, if they do not end up committing suicide in solitary confinement, they are more confused and traumatized then before, which leads these individuals to possibly commit more crimes. In this paper I will discuss several different cases in which individuals who clearly needed mental help were denied help.
In some of these cases these individuals end up committing suicide inside the facility which could have been very much prevented. Courts should be able to redirect mentally ill individuals away from being incarcerated and instead be given the proper treatment that they need. Although not much research has been conducted on mentally ill individuals that are incarcerated, the research that has been conducted has shed some light on dealing with the issues of how these individuals are dealt with and how it needs to come to an end.
According to the article, “Special Section Mentally III Populations in Jails and Prisons: A misuse of Resources” Americas prison system is a method used in containing the mentally ill. ““Mentally ill individuals are admitted to jails at approximately eight times the rate at which they are admitted to public psychiatric hospitals, and there are now more people with severe mental illness in U. S. jails than in state hospitals” (Panzer, Broner, McQuiston, 2001, p. 41).
According to the journal article “The Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey”, “In 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, a prison or jail in that state holds more individuals with serious mental illness than the largest remaining state psychiatric hospital” (Torrey et al. , 2014, p. 5). Many of the incarcerated with mental illnesses are placed in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is a room for individuals to be punished.
The mentally ill are being placed in these rooms to be separated from other inmates and because they cannot be handled by correction officers and are all usually treated the same way. This in fact places great punishment on these individuals who in most cases do not deserve it. In the article, “The Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey”, prisons and jails are referred to as the “new asylums” and goes on to state that mentally ill individuals have the right to receive proper medical care for mental illness just as individuals that suffer from diabetes, hypertension, and HIV get proper treatment.
In the next few paragraphs I will give examples of mentally ill individuals who were let down by the criminal justice system. Instead of receiving the proper care that they needed most were abused or even committed suicide. In recent years the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) came under fire when several inmates were found dead from lack of basic mental health care. In the “South Carolina Law Review” different cases are reviewed from different inmates who were not treated for mental health issues in the SCDC. In 2008, Jerome Laudman, an inmate who suffered from schizophrenia was placed into a special management unit.
During this time Jerome stopped eating and taking medication. Staff did not report his conditions. It wasn’t until seven days later that nurses found him covered with feces, vomit, and rotted food. Once he was found neither staff nor nurses wanted to help Jerome and instead waited, waited for inmates to check and retrieve his body. That same afternoon Jerome died from a heart attack. It was later found that a correctional officer was trying to cover up evidence by cleaning up the cell before photos were taken (LeCompte, 2015, p. 752).
During that same year inmate Baxter Vinson, an inmate who suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder in SCDC was found that he, “cut open his own abdomen, he spent over three hours in his cell before correctional staff finally tended to him. Correctional staff responded by confining Vinson to a restraint chair and tightening his restraints around his abdominal wound” (LeCompte, 2015, p. 753). Baxter stayed in that same position for another two hours before he received any medical care. In 2010, Edward Broxton an inmate that was placed in Crisis Intervention committed suicide by hanging himself.
A check log, which needs to be updated every fifteen minutes according to policy, noted that Edward had breakfast in his cell at 6:30am, when in actuality he hung himself an hour earlier. These cases are just a few in a hundred that came up in the case of T. R v. South Caroline Department of Corrections. According to LeCompte, “the litigation revealed that inmates had died in SCDC facilities due to a “lack of basic mental health care, and hundreds more remain[ed] substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental decompensation, and profound, permanent mental illness” (2015, p. 53).
Judge Michael Baxley found that: This litigation does not occur in a vacuum. What happens at the Department of Corrections impacts all of us, whether it is from the discharge of untreated seriously mentally ill individuals from prison into the general population, or tremendously increased costs for treatment and care that might have been prevented, or the needless increase in human suffering when use of force replaces medical care. The decisions of our [c]ourts reflect the values of our society.
To that end, our state can no longer tolerate a mental health system at [SCDC] that has broken down due to lack of finances and focus. The SCDC agreed to hiring more mental health professionals, upgrade facility, and implementation of policies. $8 million would be committed to hiring staff to screen for mental illnesses, administer medication, and suicide prevention services. This is a step forward for the SCDC and mentally ill inmates. Helping recognize mental illness in individuals before they commit crimes is the ultimate deterrence from them entering prisons and jails.
If these individuals do commit crimes public officials need to, “Implement and promote jail diversion programs such as mental health courts, use court-ordered outpatient treatment (assisted outpatient treatment/AOT) to provide the support at-risk individuals need to live safely and successfully in the community” (Torrey et al. , 2014, p. 6). In the article “The Treatment of Persons with Mental illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey” it goes on to state that, “Decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court have affirmed that prisons and jails have a duty to provide medical care to individuals in their custody” (Torrey et al. 2014, p. 11).
Policy makers need to conduct studies to compare housing the mentally ill individuals in prison and jails verses the cost of treating them in health facilities or in the community. Intake screenings need to be more precise in determining if medications are needed, suicide attempts, and other risks related with mental illness. Mandatory release planning should be provided to plan community support and foster recovery. Mental illness treatment is also needed for these individuals. Mentally ill individuals should not be punished for being mentally ill.
Mentally ill individuals should not be admitted into more jails then they are admitted into psychiatric hospitals. Most importantly mentally ill individuals should not be denied the basic health care that they so desperately need. Policy makers and courts should be able to redirect mentally ill individuals away from being incarcerated, which adds more suffering and possibly more crimes to be committed. A serious change needs to occur for these individuals to have the same rights that everyone has.