Zip It, Scaramucci!

Thanks, Mr. Scaramucci, for (as you would no doubt put it) pissing on our parade.

Anthony Scaramucci at SALT Conference 2016 By Jdarsie11 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Your verbal golden shower came down on a day that otherwise would be recalled with sunlit joy and celebration by all Americans: Friday, July 28, 2017, when, in the early hours, the Senate narrowly defeated a destructive, long-dreaded bill that would have vitiated the Affordable Care Act, and rained down havoc on the most helpless members of our society. On the poor. On the elderly. And on the mentally ill, many of whose struggling caretakers depend on the Act’s Medicaid provisions to pay for their imperiled loved ones’ medications and treatment. “Suffering humanity,” as Dorothea Dix call them. Us. 

Senator John McCain

True, the Senate managed to keep the wolves from ravaging “the miserable, the desolate, the outcast” (Dix) by only a single vote. 

(And thank you, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for casting that decisive vote, one of the most courageous and restorative gestures in American political history.) True, certain congressional leaders were callously pleased to keep the threat of repeal alive, and the dread among potential casualties ratcheting upward, for seven years before decency narrowly prevailed. And true, this legislative rough beast’s hour could come round again, and it could arise and slouch toward Washington to be reborn.

All true. But early on Friday, suffering humanity caught a rare break. And we will take what we can get. It should be a day for celebrating, for parades.

But on second thought, no. Better to stay indoors to avoid the stench, or venture outside only with galoshes. Because on Thursday, Anthony Scaramucci came along and relieved himself of some stuff he’d been holding in. Figurative fly unzipped, the White House’s brand-new “Communications Director” communicated to the New Yorker magazine exactly how much he knew or cared about chronic mental illness, about its victims, and about those whose lives and emotions are bound up in the scourge.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon

Within hours, nearly all major news outlets had reported Scaramucci’s hot flow:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/us/politics/scaramucci-priebus-leaks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The paragraph below, taken from the Times report, is representative:

“Mr. Scaramucci, who has so emulated Mr. Trump’s style that colleagues privately call him ‘Mini-Me,’ made clear in his conversation with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that he is trying to push Mr. Priebus out. ‘Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,’ he said. Mr. Scaramucci complained that Mr. Priebus had prevented him from getting a job in the White House until now, saying he ‘blocked Scaramucci for six months.’”

Mind you, Scaramucci’s now-famous rant was not on the topic of mental illness, per say. Divinely, it was on the topic of leaks. He could not hold in his vengeful fury over the fact that leaks had been flowing out of the White House in a steady stream, and he was pissed off about it, and he thought he knew who was leaking, and that man’s career was as good as in the toilet.

And indeed, the press coverage focused almost entirely upon Scaramucci’s complaint, and upon the spectacularly obscene language he employed in his tirade to the New Yorker’s Lizza. The man does appear to have an uncommon predilection for using his own genitals as metaphor, which has emboldened me to adapt that general framework in this essay.

Yet (to get, finally, to my point) it was neither Scaramucci’s attack on Reince Priebus nor his affection for scatology that is my concern here. Rather, it is his recourse to “paranoid schizophrenic” and “paranoiac” that makes my blood boil.

Here, after all, is the man whose public voice (god forbid we should hear his private voice!) is, by definition, the voice of the Administration. What Anthony Scaramucci thinks and says, especially in conversation with reporters, can fairly be construed as an extension of what his chief, President Donald Trump, thinks and says. (And if that is not the case, we must ask why the president did not fire or at least rebuke him following his use of “paranoid schizophrenic” and “paranoiac” as expletives.)

This usage cuts far deeper than mere coarseness or ugly language, which we have come to expect in Donald Trump’s administration. “Paranoid schizophrenic” and “paranoiac” are terms of neuropsychiatry, and they have specific referents: to individuals whose brains have been severely damaged by malign genes acting in harmony with environmental stressors.

Among the many burdens endured by the chronically mentally ill and those committed to safeguarding them is the misuse of “paranoid schizophrenic,” “paranoiac,” and a several other medically descriptive words: their misuse as hateful epithets, with the implication that those who answer to such descriptions are somehow morally inferior. The widespread acceptance of this misuse is part of the lifeblood of stigma, the uninformed and biased contempt for the mentally ill that still stands in the path of enlightened, and necessary, reforms.

In attempting to smear Reince Priebus with the labels “paranoid schizophrenic” and “paranoiac,” White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has given para-official legitimization to the ongoing stigma and to the destruction it causes. He has gratuitously dishonored the mentally ill of this country and wounded their protectors. He has almost surely articulated the unfeeling, uncaring, irresponsible attitude of the Administration toward “crazy people.”

And the dark ugliness of his rhetoric has robbed the celebratory day of July 28, 2017, of some of its celebratory luster over a rare victory for the mentally ill.

I have no way of knowing, of course, how Anthony Scaramucci himself feels about his rash outburst of schoolyard invective, or whether he plans to apologize for it, as he should, instead of dismissing it as “colorful language,” as he dids.

I do know this, though: he has no reason to flush with pride.

 

Two Police Officers Are Charged in Assault of Mentally Ill Man

“After Mr. Bear-heels’s death, the Omaha police chief, Todd Schmaderer, said that the department had “failed” and that officers would receive additional training. A police spokesman said on Wednesday that the chief was not available to comment.”–The New York Times

Or as Bob Dylan put it in the last line of “Oxford Town”: “Somebody better ‘vestigate soon.”

Thanks to Dj Jaffe for originally posting this.

via The New York Times

Photo

Ryan McClarty, left, and Scotty Payne, former Omaha police officers, were charged. CreditOmaha Police Department

Two former police officers in Nebraska were charged with assault after beating and using a Taser on a mentally ill man as they tried to take him into custody for “erratic behavior” in Omaha last month, an official said on Wednesday. The man later died.

The Douglas County attorney, Donald W. Kleine, said in a televised news conference that Scotty Payne, a five-year veteran, faces charges of felony second-degree assault for repeatedly shocking the man, Zachary Bear-heels, 29, with a Taser on June 5.

Ryan McClarty, who has been on the force for two years, was charged with misdemeanor assault for punching Mr. Bear-heels, Mr. Kleine said.

“Zachary Bear-heels had committed no crime,” Mr. Kleine said. “He was simply a human being suffering from severe mental illness that was quite obvious to anyone who was in contact with him.”

Asked why the former officers had not been charged with murder or manslaughter, he said, “There is no evidence whatsoever that these officers intentionally killed Mr. Bear-heels.” He said the coroner’s office ruled that Mr. Bear-heels’s death was caused by “excited delirium.”

Attorney Don Kleine to files assault charges against 2 officers Video by KETV NewsWatch 7

“That is something we had a question about,” Mr. Kleine said, referring to possible tougher charges. But he said his office could find no “approximate cause” linking the officers’ actions to the cause of death — such as the use of the Taser, or the blows, which did not result in “brain bleed” or contusions to the brain, he said.

Photo

The funeral of Zachary Bear-heels in Apache, Oklahoma, in June.

The officers were fired Friday, after the Omaha Police Department investigated the episode.

Mr. Payne, 38, is due to turn himself in on Friday for a bail hearing, and Mr. McClarty, 27, will be cited on suspicion of third-degree assault, Mr. Kleine said.

Matthew D. Burns, a lawyer for Mr. Payne, said his client was “devastated” and “feels terrible because a person lost his life.”

Mr. McClarty’s lawyer could not immediately be reached.

Mr. Kleine said he was filing the charges before a grand jury being called to look into the case, which has attracted concern from Mr. Bear-heels’s Native American community. The felony assault charge carries up to 20 years in prison — the same as manslaughter — and the other charge can carry up to one year in prison, a $1,000 fine or both.

According to a police statement, the episode started on June 3, when Mr. Bear-heels was taking a bus from Murdo, S.D., to Oklahoma City. He was dropped off at a station in Omaha and was not allowed to re-board because a passenger had complained about his behavior.

On June 4, Mr. Bear-heels’s mother, Renita Chalepah, called the Omaha Police Department to report that her son was missing and that he was bipolar and had schizophrenia. On June 5, officers were called to a gas station because of a disturbance and found a man, later identified as Mr. Bear-heels, dancing in front of the convenience store and refusing to leave, according to the police.

Officers on the scene spoke to his mother about where to take him. But after he was placed into a cruiser in handcuffs for “erratic behavior,” he tried to leave the vehicle, and four officers, including Officer Payne and Officer McClarty, tried to restrain him and force him back into the car.

Photo

Zachary Bear-heels, who died after an encounter with Omaha police officers. CreditKETV NewsWatch 7, via YouTube 

After a struggle, Officer Payne shouted, “Taser, Taser,” and warned Mr. Bear-heels three more times that the Taser would be used, the statement said.

Photo

Mr. Bear-heels’s grave in Apache, Okla. CreditKent Sievers/The World-Herald

Officer Payne then discharged the device, which struck Mr. Bear-heels in the abdomen and right thigh. The officer continued to activate the device as it clung to Mr. Bear-heels, who resisted being dragged into the vehicle. As Mr. Bear-heels was propped up in a sitting position against the car, he stopped resisting, the police statement said, but Officer Payne kept using the Taser on him over the next one minute 45 seconds.

“You’re gonna get it again,” the police statement quoted the officer as saying.

“These are egregious violations of the Omaha Police Department’s policy, procedures and training on use of force and the use of a Taser,” the statement said.

After Mr. Bear-heels managed to slip a hand out of the cuffs, swung his arms and kicked out with his legs, Officer McClarty punched him in the head and neck area multiple times while Officer Payne used the Taser again — making it about 12 times that he used the device on Mr. Bear-heels, the police statement said.

Part of the encounter was caught on a dashboard camera of a police vehicle and shown during the news conference.

After more police officers arrived to help, Mr. Bear-heels was handcuffed to a gurney. Medics then said he had stopped breathing and had no pulse. Mr. Bear-heels was pronounced dead in the hospital, the police said.

After Mr. Bear-heels’s death, the Omaha police chief, Todd Schmaderer, said that the department had “failed” and that officers would receive additional training. A police spokesman said on Wednesday that the chief was not available to comment.

One woman, a member of the Native American community who attended the news conference, tearfully spoke up about her fears for her own mentally ill son. “We are people, too,” she said.

Watchman, what of the night? Strike that. What of the Watchman?

The book is permanently closed now on James “Abba” Boyd. The book may be closed as well on the police body-cam as a check on violent police behavior, especially toward the mentally ill.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer pursue criminal charges in the most shocking, sensational, and visually documented, episode of lethal force by police in the young century. 

Was the lethal force necessary? View the clip above and judge for yourself. The overwhelming popular consensus holds that it was not. Yet in a court of law, a trial in which jurors viewed the footage, cutting-edge forensic technology yielded to the oldest form of persuasion known to man: words. Artful words, delivered by an “expert witness” for the defense. Second-degree murder charges against the two officers, detective Keith Sandy and officer Dominique Perez, who fired bullets into the psychotic Boyd at close range dissolved in a hung jury. And on Wednesday, federal investigators announced that they saw no point in continuing their inquiry.

I wrote about the Boyd killing, and the outrage aroused by the video, in Chapter 10, “Chaos and Heartbreak,” of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE. More details, and much testimony, has poured forth in the three years between my writing and Wednesday’s final withdrawal by the Justice Department. Here is a summary of how the story built, and of the significance I believe it holds.

 

WHO WAS JAMES “ABBA” BOYD?

As reporters Patrick Malone and Daniel J. Chacón describe him in this probing profile a month after he was killed http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/in-death-by-police-bullets-boyd-has-become-a-cause/article_a356df2a-55ba-5ca8-aac1-432f63640bf0.html, Boyd was a lost soul from the moment of his birth until the moment of his death. His alcoholic and abusive parents divorced. His father beat him with a rubber hose, and Boyd claimed sexual abuse by relatives. He spent much of his childhood in foster homes, and much of his adulthood in mental institutions and in jail. He was chronically homeless. His sister recalled that despite these hardships, James was “highly sensitive, affectionate and intelligent with a good sense of humor.”

These traits could not save him from being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

As a mentally ill homeless man in a medium-sized city (population 559,000), Boyd was inferentially known to the police. Known and despised. In fact, another bit of recorded evidence, not widely circulated, appears to substantiate the inference. A squad car dash-cam recorded a conversation between Detective Sandy and another officer as they headed toward the Sandia foothills. The voices are indistinct and variously interpreted, but seemed to indicate that Sandy knew his quarry.

Albuquerque TV station KOAT published a transcript that has Sandy promising his partner: “This lunatic—I’m gonna shoot him with a Taser shotgun.” http://www.koat.com/article/james-boyd-shooting-officer-keith-sandy-to-retire/4467732. The Free Thought Project, an alternative public-policy watchdog organization http://thefreethoughtproject.com/officer-sandy-murderer-james-boyd-stated-shoot-penis-hours-killing/, published an even darker version: “For this f***ing lunatic?  I’m going to shoot him in the penis with a shotgun here in a second.”

 

 

THE CRISIS BEGINS

It was said of Boyd that the one corner of the world where he could find a measure of peace, and some relief from the thoughts that tormented him, was the remote sweep of the Sandia foothills about 13 miles east of Albuquerque. It was here, of course, that he was slaughtered.

Boyd was 39 when he made his final visit to those foothills on the Sunday of March 16, 2004. The husky, bearded man with deep circles under his eyes carried some rudimentary camping equipment in a bulging kind of knapsack. He may have been wailing. A resident of a gated community on the edge of the wasteland looked out his window and spotted him. The spotter was offended: camping without a permit was against the law! He called the police.

Before long, squad cars with flashing red lights began screeching to a halt in the vicinity. As the day wore on, reinforcements arrived; the armed force would swell to forty officers, including a SWAT team. Officers deployed and crept toward Boyd, who was standing motionless beside a large rock. They had brought service revolvers, Taser guns, a rifle, a “bean-bag”-dispensing shotgun, a German shepherd attack dog, and a supply of “flash-bangs”—non-lethal devices used to stun and temporarily blind a suspect. Apparently, fighter jets from nearby Kirtland Air Force Base were unavailable.

The police made do with what they had. They demanded that Boyd surrender. Threatened and thrown on the defensive—the most dangerous possible state for someone in psychosis—sBoyd stood his ground. The video shows a small white object in each of his hands. Police would later describe the objects as knives.

 

DENOUEMENT

To their credit, the police did not attack immediately. The single police officer present who’d had some crisis-negotiation training tried to talk Boyd into giving up. The addled man responded that he was the Defense Department and did not appreciate being given orders. The talk eddied and ebbed and flowed for an hour or so, as the two discussed Playstation games and whether Boyd could have a meal at a Denny’s if he surrendered.

Eventually, a senior office pulled the negotiator away and assigned him to another duty. Now effective communication had ended.

The standoff continued. It ended after more than three hours, near nightfall. The video shows Boyd seemingly ready to walk the short distance down the slope to where a clutch of cops faced him, weapons drawn. The sticking point, fatal to him, was that he refused to drop the knives in his hands.

And then all law-enforcement breaks loose. Boyd turns to his right and bends to pick up his knapsack. He hoists it over his shoulder and bends again. Bewilderingly, it is at this vulnerable and unthreatening moment, with Boyd absorbed in gathering his belongings, that an officer lobs a flash-bang. It explodes at the cornered man’s feet and produces the desired effect. Boyd lurches, then drops the sack, spreads his arms, and freezes. Sandy and Perez close within four feet of him, the German shepherd racing out ahead. The officers yell, “Get on the ground!” When Boyd refuses, they open fire with rifle and pistol. Boyd begins a pivot to his left, at which point he takes a rifle bullet to his back, ripping through a lung. Bullets strike both his arms, shattering the right one. He sprawls face-down on the rocky ground and receives a bean-bag blast in his buttocks. The dog continues to worry at him. Clearly, he is grievously wounded, yet the officers show no urgency in getting him off to a hospital. Instead, they surreally insist on him getting his hands up, although he is prone.

As I write in Chapter 10,

“The shooting stops, and the police chat among themselves for a few moments, striking attitudes of disengagement weirdly typical of officers—and perpetrators as well—in the seconds following use of lethal force. Then an officer leans down to the mortally wounded man and tugs harshly at his left arm. At length he yanks it free [from beneath Boyd’s torso], and everyone crowds around to see what is in Boyd’s hand. From the video it is not clear what, if anything, he had been holding.”

Eventually the police transport Boyd to a hospital half an hour away. That night, doctors amputate his shattered arm and remove the punctured lung. A few hours later, James “Abba” Boyd dies.

 

THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

The expeditionary force’s successful neutralization of the menace that had been James Boyd provided a marker in the annals of police violence in America. It ignited two days of street protest in Albuquerque (police resorted to tear gas on the demonstrators) and briefly seized the attention of the national news media. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/when-cops-break-bad-albuquerque-police-force-gone-wild-20150129

The city’s residents were unstrung by years of lethal gunplay by the city’s police department: some thirty-seven shooting deaths of civilians since 2010 alone, resulting in twenty-three of them fatally (three-fourths of these were mentally ill). None of these cases produced an indictment. Yet Albuquerque paid out a cumulative $28 million to settle officer misconduct lawsuits.

But even this sustained butchery took second place to another factor that raised James “Abba” Boyd’s execution in the New Mexico foothills to almost a sacrificial moment: with it, the body-cam came of age.

Miniature video-recording devices had been on the market and in use by some police forces for several years before this event. Yet never had the footage from one made such an impact on the public imagination or on law-enforcement policy. After the Albuquerque police department released this shocking visual narrative at the demands of the Boyd family’s lawyers, it—and the still images made from it—played on TV newscasts, in newspapers, and on websites. Versions of it, edited to varying lengths, are still available on You Tube.

It was just this visual narrative that caught my attention as I began work on NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE in 2014. Credulous fool that I am, I included the Boyd/body-cam saga partly because I believed that it heralded a milestone. This device, surely, would usher in an era of accountability and self-restraint among those police officers who might otherwise give vent to their more sadistic impulses.

Ho.

 

USHERING IN A NEW. . .ERROR

Three years can be a long time for the lifespan of an era in this country. As I commented at the beginning of this essay, the book is permanently closed now on James “Abba” Boyd. And closed along with it is the hope that the body-cam, or any other deus ex machina, might ensure safety—or at least the lives—of mentally ill people in trouble with the law, law enforcement, or jailers.

Largely on the strength of the damning video, detective Keith Sandy and officer Dominique Perez, who’d fired the fatal bullets into Boyd, were indicted on second-degree murder charges. But last October, a mistrial resulted when jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict.

 

OF PICTURES AND WORDS

A pivotal element in the trial was the testimony of an expert witness: specifically, a “policing expert” named Ronald McCarthy. McCarthy screened the body-cam footage, commenting on it as it ran. He testified that the officers had used the right tactics and followed standard training during the standoff. http://www.mybendbroadband.com/news/read/category/us/article/the_associated_press-defense_witness_police_did_everything_right_in_sho-ap

McCarthy, who is 78, is a former SWAT team member. A profile of him in the online journal New Mexico In Depth http://nmindepth.com/2016/12/04/officers-language-strips-emotion-from-shootings/ describes his courtroom skill in using “stilted, mechanical language [which] is typical of jargon used by police officers across the country in reports and testimony. But when used to describe a police officer’s decision to use deadly force, it can also have the added result, intentional or not, of transforming a chaotic, emotionally charged scene into an abstract, formulaic equation” and thus desensitize a jury to the moral consequences of what is being tried.

The report was published in December 2016 by journalists Justin Horwath and Jeff Proctor, and it deserves wider attention than it probably received. Horwath and Proctor take us into a pervasive world of para-militarized courtspeakdesigned exactly to accomplish what George Orwell prophesied: “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” 

For instance, guns are not “guns” in this specialized language; they are “systems,” or “platforms.” Police officers use them not against human beings, but against “problems.” The policeman’s duty is to “fire until that problem disappears from the sight picture.”

Or, to update the adage: A picture is no longer worth a thousand words. In courtspeak, not even a thousand words are worth a word.

Law enforcement failed James Boyd. Forensic technology failed James Boyd. Language failed James Boyd. And the search continues for some way to bolster the odds of simple continued existence among society’s most abject members as they are confronted by the most dangerous of the most powerful.

________________

Justice for James Boyd: https://www.facebook.com/Justice-for-James-Boyd-1451885931714544/

And the Beat(ing) Goes on

The national scandal of criminal-justice brutality against the mentally ill continues:

via Reno Gazette-Journal

Released video depicts fatal struggle at Washoe jail

JUSTIN THOMPSON, 35, DIED IN AUGUST AFTER A VIOLENT STRUGGLE WITH DEPUTIES THAT LASTED MORE THAN A HALF HOUR.

Read the full story here: http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/05/03/released-video-depicts-fatal-struggle-washoe-jail/309046001/

O for the honor we did blow When we empowered Sheriff Joe!

Jail reform must address mental health, substance dependence

via Arizona Capitol Times.

A hallucinating inmate caught spitting and urinating on the floor of his cell. A woman wildly smearing fecal matter on her cell walls. These were just two of 47 unstable disturbing accounts detailed in the class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and its former leader, Joe Arpaio, “America’s toughest sheriff.”

Read the full story here: http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2017/07/13/jail-reform-must-address-mental-health-substance-dependence/

The Slaughter Goes On

Several weeks ago, I suspended this blog, largely out of lingering psychic exhaustion after the completion and publication of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE.

Since then, I have noticed that the problems I covered in the book have not been suspended. The ones most troubling to me include the appalling indifference–by public policymakers and by the society that elects them–toward the ongoing obscenity of throwing mentally ill young people into county jails, where many are deprived of essential medication, beaten by guards and inmates, and thrown senselessly into solitary confinement, a form of torture on a par with waterboarding. This obscenity is largely a factor of the massive bed shortages in our vanishing psychiatric hospitals–juicy targets for budget-cutting legislatures, and a problem that has not been adequately addressed since the catastrophe of deinstitutionalization.

Another problem–one that loomed suddenly while the book was in production, with the election of Donald Trump and the inexplicable wave of cruelty that has hardened amidst the Republican Congress, is the threat to the existence of Medicaid support for the seriously mentally ill along with many other categories of sufferers.

Yet another is the perceived softening of the National Alliance for Mental Illness–NAMI–in its outreach to the seriously mentally ill. The powerful activists Dj Jaffe, Janet Hayes (https://www.facebook.com/JanetHaysNOLA), Teresa Pasquini (https://www.facebook.com/teresa.pasquini.3), Lauren Rettagliatta (https://www.facebook.com/lauren.rettagliata), Mary Zdanowicz (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1296146654)  (so many determined women! So few men!) and the nonpareil blogger Pete Earley (http://www.peteearley.com/blog/) have commented on this with varying degrees of concern. The common criticism is that NAMI is pulling away from outreach toward victims of serious mental illness–incurable brain afflictions transmitted through the genes–and concentrating its resources, and its funding opportunities, on a “big tent” approach that emphasizes “mental wellness,” or “mental health.” The plight of these sufferers, most but not all of whom fall under Freud’s term, “the worried well,” deserve outreach. But that outreach is being supplied by several other organizations formed specifically to answer their needs.

I share others’ concern and outrage over all these issues. What disturbs me most acutely these days is a recent surge in the brutalization, often fatal, of mentally ill young men at the hands of police and prison guards. I append a few links to these atrocities below.

I believe that this brutalization, fed largely by the twin jail/hospital crises mentioned above, is a stain on our national character, and that we must mobilize a movement to reform it.

As some visitors to the blog know, I speak as the father of two schizophrenic sons, one of whom took his life in 2005, and one of whom lives on with us in a condition of stability if not recovery. As awful, and as enduringly heartbreaking, as their fates, each was spared the dehumanizing horrors of falling into the criminal-justice system. In my surviving son’s one encounter with the police, in our hometown of Castleton, Vermont, the officer acted with tact, humanity, and restraint. I feel that it is my mission–exhausted and often in despair as I am over these ongoing crises, to do what I can to ignite the conscience of Americans and those whom they elect to protect and enhance society, especially its most helpless citizens.

(Okay, full confession: I just re-read that last sentence, and it sounds pompous as hell. Sue me!)

Links

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/07/15/his-parents-said-just-needed-sleep-swat-team-came-instead/1sTWdBw2MNqqFGCOUfLnHL/story.html?s_campaign=breakingnews%3Anewsletter

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/05/03/released-video-depicts-fatal-struggle-washoe-jail/309046001/

https://www.hopexchangenonprofit.org/blog/our-minds-are-not-our-only-prison-where-is-the-social-justice-for-the-mentally-ill-when-far-too-many-are-coming-out-of-jail-in-body-bags-or-receiving-humane-treatment

http://www.wbrc.com/story/35819522/what-happened-to-jamie-lee-wallace#.WWJPUm5TXw8.facebook

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8gy4/the-prison-system-is-designed-to-ignore-mental-illness

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