The Horror of One Mentally Ill Man’s Journey Through America’s Prison System

http://www.alternet.org/horror-one-mentally-ill-mans-journey-through-americas-prison-system




Back in the Middle Ages, if you suffered from a serious mental illness, a physician might have applied leeches to your forehead to suck out the “bad blood.” Or perhaps a priest would treat you to an exorcism and dunk you in hot water to drive out the demon thought to have taken residence in your body. Certainly not pleasant. But infinitely preferable to what you could face today in America’s prison system.

In North Carolina, here is what happened to Michael Anthony Kerr, a 54-year-old African American man suffering from schizoaffective disorder, a condition that combines symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He did not live to tell the story, but the facts are slowly emerging. Warning: this is a horror tale.

Kerr had had several run-ins with the law, mostly for larceny, and he’d recently suffered what relatives described as deterioration in his mental state when two of his sons died as a result of gang violence. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, Kerr was sent to Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, NC in 2011 with a draconian 32-year sentence after being convicted of illegally discharging a firearm. He had fired a gun into the house where one of his sons lived, and into the house of a neighbor whose cousin had been convicted of murdering his other son.

In prison, Kerr was not given any treatment for his condition, even though his sister says she called state prison officials repeatedly to tell them that her brother needed psychological help.