Locking Down the Mentally Ill: Solitary Confinement Cells Have Become America's New Asylums

"If you want to know where they are all being kept," said Todd Winstrom, "they're down in the hole."


Winstrom, a staff attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, was talking about what happens to mentally ill offenders when they enter his state's prison system. Without treatment options--and without anyplace else to put them--these prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement, where they may remain for months or years.

Since solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe psychological trauma in prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions, it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging place to incarcerate the mentally ill.

Winstrom was quoted by Jessica VanEgeren of Madison's Capital Times as part of her June 10, 2009 investigative report on mentally ill inmates in Wisconsin correctional institutions. VanEgeren, who led a breakout session on "Treatment of Mentally Ill Offenders" at this month's 5thannual H.F. Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, described a destructive cycle in which these prisoners--untreated, unmedicated, and sometimes undiagnosed--were placed in "segregation" and left isolated in their cells for 23 hours a day.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Locking-Down-the-Mentally-by-James-Ridgeway-and-100222-3.html

seclusion rooms were ordered by the doctor for a period of no longer than an hour (at least where I worked) and checks through the door had to be done every 10 minutes. They were reserved for the worst acting out episodes.

I think a case can be made for the fact that permanent seclusion is cruel and unusual punishment, especially since these people are often sick, not evil. Medication would have to be forced, but it would likely modify their mental status to the point they could be in the general population.

The civil liberties lawyers erred on two counts: first, thinking discharged mental patients would seek out treatment even if it was available and second, having too tight a definition of "danger to oneself or others." As someone with people in the family who go off their meds and wreck their lives from time to time, I know that definition has to be broadened to include severe damage to job, finances and relationships. It would be nice to get my family members some treatment BEFORE they're out on the street, not after.

What we are doing is not working for anyone, especially the mentally ill. I would hope the state mental facilities are brought back in some form for people who are consistently violent off their meds and who refuse to take those meds.

Prison is worse than the old state hospitals ever were.

Solitary confinment can drive a sane person crazy....this is just wrong on so many levels.
You would think, being such a wise and wonderful Nation and all that..we would do better by those who need help.

This is a population without advocates, just like homeless people and people with disabilities.

We aren't important to ANYONE.

edited to say----please post this in GD, somebody. This needs much wider understanding, and not be sequestered where few see it.

"reformed" the mental health industry in the U.S. in the 1960's they set two primary goals: to de-institutionalize as many mentally ill people as possible and to create centers and homes in the community where these folks could be treated without being institutionalized.

They pretty much accomplished the first goal by 1970: Mental institutions nation wide released their patients and down scaled their operations.

The second goal they just plain didn't fund so it just didn't happen. Some more progressive states, such as Minnesota, did more than others. Some states just didn't do squat.

So by the 1980's our cities began to see large populations of mentally ill people living on the street and otherwise going undiagnosed and untreated. As a result, as much as half of the prison population may have a diagnosable mental illness. A large proportion are mentally retarded or borderline so (IQs between 55 and 75).

The ones in solitary are just the acute, severe and dangerous.

For those who work in the "mental health industry" it's long been known that the largest mental health institutions in the U.S. are the prisons.

I get so tired of people connecting Reagan with that and the burgeoning of the homeless population, which leads to people dismissing us all as "mentally ill" because they don't understand the true facts.

society goes up.

There is a direct coorelation.

THAT'S an aspect we can do something about, if we have the will to do it.