More Voices From the Sub-Nation: the Mentally Ill Remain Imprisoned in the Dark Ages

The mothers of America’s mentally ill children continue to find their voices of fierce witness at the ignorance, arrogance, and brutalization of the insane that are the norms in our hospitals, courts, and jails. (Yet, again I ask: why is it nearly always and only the mothers?!) I defy anyone to read the testimonies below and not emerge trembling with outrage: outrage at the often lethal ineptitude with which police and judges and wardens and even doctors increase the damage to our most damaged citizens and those who love them.

Photo credit: Ron Powers

Except for the first of these messages, a mesmerizing cri de coeur written and posted by Laural Fawcett, these accounts have been written for private Facebook sites. I quote from them with permission of the authors.


UPDATE ON SHAYLON: IT’S NOT REALLY GOOD NEWS by Laural Fawcett

September 12, 2017

 

Okay, so here we go again on the merry-go-round of horrors. I have an update about Shaylon. It’s not really good news. 

Shaylon, my son, has had a number of psychotic episodes which led him to harm himself and others. Severe visual and auditory hallucinations caused him to leave home and end up on the street. He recently spent a year-and-a-half in jail (he was released in June 2017) because he thought a pedestrian passerby was attacking him and trying to set his feet on fire. This occurred in San Francisco where he often ends up when he is hallucinating. For some reason he, and many others like him, are drawn to San Francisco. I kind of don’t blame them. It’s a pretty nice city to be in.

I just finished my training as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). I have a new job but, essentially, I’m homeless and couch surfing until I get into permanent housing somewhere. It’s not the easiest thing to do here in the San Francisco Bay Area where my son has been incarcerated and denied appropriate housing and treatment.

In the last couple of weeks, I showed up at Shaylon’s two court hearings. (He was picked up for failing a probation check-in.) What a total, farcical, miscarriage of justice and waste of my time except for the precious opportunity to get a glimpse my son. He was medicated but obviously in psychosis and not well.

The judge repeatedly said, “We don’t want you here. You don’t belong here and you need to stay away from San Francisco.” He didn’t speak to other criminal defendants, prior to my son, in such a condescending manner. In fact, other defendants were offered programs and assistance. My son was told, “We can’t keep monitoring you.” My son’s probation officer was reassigned and his new probation officer wrote up a travesty of a report asking him to be extradited to Fresno. The courtroom erupted in laughter when the judge said, “Contrary to popular belief, Fresno is not a foreign country so we cannot extradite him.” Neither treatment nor acknowledgement of my son’s medical diagnosis were offered. Compassion was in short supply but immature snickering and cruel comments were plentiful.

The court told Shaylon to leave the city — permanently — and ordered him to be released to the streets, again, at an unknown time. I was ignored and marginalized even though the public defender tried to alert the court that I was present on my son’s behalf as advocate and caregiver. I wasn’t allowed to speak.

I had to travel to Fresno that day to finish my old apartment walk-through to end tenancy and get my much needed deposit back. But my needs and my son’s needs were not considered.

Now, once again, Shaylon’s whereabouts are unknown.

The public defender’s department is saying that the probation department is responsible for providing access to treatment and housing services. The probation department is saying that the public defender’s department is responsible for providing treatment and housing services. Meanwhile, no treatment or housing services are being provided by either.  Behind the scenes I discuss how to implement said services with my son’s prior assigned probation officer. It remains to be seen.

Why are people with neurological brain disorders being incarcerated? Why isn’t my son getting treatment for his psychosis?

Medical professionals and others should be asking, “What is the purpose of the health care and mental health care systems?” In my opinion, the purpose of the healthcare system, and this weird, dangling, anomalous part of it called the “mental health care system,” is to bring a person to optimal health. That can’t be done in the criminal justice system.

Some of the scariest, most dangerous patients I deal with, as an EMT, have dementia or Alzheimer’s. They’re medically fragile, confused, and unpredictable. They require tremendous amounts of care and resources, and can wreak havoc on the healthcare system and those who try to work with them. We don’t let them wander the streets in misery. We don’t discriminate against this population the way we do the seriously mentally ill.

I stand alone. I’m indignant about the injustice against a person, with a grave disability, who happens to be my son. The court forces me to abandon him to street-life hell and homelessness. The court is telling Shaylon to disappear. He’s being stripped of his humanity.

Photo credit: Ron Powers

Below are some portions of other messages that I have been receiving and archiving for inclusion in a blog on this theme:

 

From Roseann Pruett:

My daughter, Beth, is in her fifth month [in solitary confinement] at Madison County jail, Edwardsville, Il. [The warden] says he wants to find her a bed but I don’t believe that any longer! John Q. Public has no idea. No hope left…I believe they will end her life one way or another. Court cancelled many times. I could go on and on. My beautiful paralegal daughter, mother of 3, grandmother, sister to 4 others. Oh, yeah, did I say her twin brother was in there 5 yrs. ago. Beat him to a pulp! Would gladly exchange places with her! If only she could get the medical attention she needs so desperately. I’m out…

The mother who writes below is living in isolation somewhere in America. She fears reprisals if her name is attached to this.

 

I lost my son on January 2, 2008. He is one of the thousand people killed every year by law enforcement. He had been placed under the auspices of Telecare corporation1https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747134/, after many years of hospitalization more than a year before he was killed. I had a strong disagreement with the doctor in charge of the local Telecare. He put [my son] on an antidepressant. I told him that my son was a classic paranoid schizophrenic and should not be on an antidepressant. He said, “With the cocktail of antipsychotics he is on, he needs something to wake him up in the morning.” My son was conserved by the county so the doctor didn’t need to listen to my wishes. I learned after his death that ALL of the patients, upon being transferred out to Telecare, had been re-diagnosed schizoaffective by this doctor.

From what he had to say I realized the man loved making cocktails and did not want anything like a Bipolar or schizophrenia diagnosis to interfere with his fun. Within Telecare my son was at two different well supervised places so I did not understand that the next house was to be different. I was told he had graduated from their program and did I want to hold him back? They had supposedly been teaching him to shop and cook but he was severely ill. He could participate in the training, (2 months worth)! But he was in no way able to access food when they put him into a place that did not offer food or anyone supervising (even though they called it a board and care). It was the week between Christmas and New Years. My son must not have been home when they delivered his med package for the week. They put it on top of the refrigerator in the shared kitchen and forgot to check to see if he was taking the nine different medications, (13 pills), in his S.M.W.Th.F.S. Box to be taken twice daily. Four days later another patient told the Telecare employee that my son needs to be 5150ed. That was ignored. On the fifth day they realized he had gone off his meds and they decided to cover it up. THE upshot of all that was he went into the knife drawer, (sharp knives in a house of unsupervised mental patients)? He walked around the backyard with the knife and the other patient later told the police that they were not scared of my son but scared for him. He was scared too as he sequestered himself in his locked room. A patient had gone to the office two blocks away. A very deadpan employee called the cops and, (I have the cd), told them my son was chasing other patients with a knife. Which was not true. A cop, who later explained that he was into SWAT techniques and went to workshops in SWAT on his weekends, was the first responder and set off the incident by jumping the gun. Or taser I should say. My son was then immediately shot four times with a glock and then tased for an additional thirty seconds straight while they screamed at him to put his hands behind his back so they could handcuff him. He was lying on the floor clutching at the mortal wounds on his torso. I only regret that I was not there to stand between them and him. Please feel free to ask any questions. It’s hard to describe this stuff so I almost can hear the monotone I usually go into while describing his death. I am still committed to telling the story to those who want to know.

I would be really grateful if you would use my story. I have written extensively on it but don’t have it all pulled together. I recently got into a fb debate with someone and he found the newspaper report on my son’s death and put it up on the thread. That newspaper report made my son look like a psycho killer type. It makes my story look like I am lying to defend him. Just mentioning this because you may want to question my account too. Perhaps before you write about it you will want to ask questions for clarification. That’s fine. We have been among the ignored as my son was not of color and was not a child but was 24 and he had weighed over 300 lbs as a result of all those medications. He had been a handsome guy as a teenager and not even slightly overweight. To the extent our story can help educate I really want you to be able to use it, Ron, and thank you for wanting to.

 

These are excerpts from messages written by the mother of a young man, evaluated (too late) as schizophrenic by two doctors, who is awaiting trial on a charge of murder. It is a truism, and also true, that the vast majority of the mentally ill are not violent; yet the untreated mentally ill are at greater risk of harming themselves and others. “Matthew’s” schizophrenia symptoms were initially mistaken for symptoms of drug abuse, a tragically common error. This account also demonstrates the persistent, disgraceful willingness of too many prosecutors to treat the mentally ill as common criminals.

 

. . .In retrospect, what we were told were drug issues during our son’s junior year in high school were actually the first signs of his brain disorder.

He was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital three times from age 17 to 20. His last admittance was October 2015. He was catatonic. We thought he had taken some K22https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/synthetic-cannabinoids-k2spicebecause that’s what they told us the last time…once again in hindsight this was his first total psychotic break.  After that he came home and got a job as a groundskeeper at our Country Club.

Summer came and went and things were great. On November 13. . .he took his dad’s truck without permission. . .He was acting strangely, mumbling to himself, staying up all night and day, pacing, saying strange things to the family, like, “I’m not going to let them hurt you,” and “The chip they put in my head is how they’re following me.”

On November 30, 2016, I got a call: there was an altercation at the Country Club involving Matthew. I drove there. As I approached I could see police and sheriffs and SWAT teams.  Our son allegedly had obtained an unsecured rifle from the shed and shot and killed his co-worker.

Photo credit: Ron Powers

.

. . .We are shattered. He is a wonderful, warm, highly intelligent, compassionate young man.  No one who knows him can believe this. The drug screen at the jail was negative. The court-appointed lawyer met with him and called to ask us if he had ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

 

We were stunned. The answer was no, never; the doctors had always assumed drug reactions. Another lawyer met with Matthew asked us the exact same question. So, two doctors evaluated him and both believe he was in a psychotic break.

 

That was December. As I write, it is July. The jail has had him medicated since. He spent time in solitary, and now he in Gen Pop [the general prison population].

 

The prosecutor offered him 50 YEARS [in return for a guilty plea]!! We turned it down. Now we are trying to get him a bed at a secure facility, but they won’t give him a bed unless they evaluate him and I doubt the judge will lower the bond [$500,000] without a guarantee of commitment. We are hoping that we can get the bond reduced and get him the care he needs. The meds he is on are a band aid, and there is no therapy at all.

 

. . .He’s been told what happened [the shooting], but has no clear recollection of the two weeks prior to the incident or weeks after.

We will not let him be another statistic…

We are holding up as best as we can, I am on antidepressants.

Photo credit: Ron Powers

We have been researching schizophrenia, and Matthew is “textbook.” But with the right medication and counseling he can live a somewhat normal life.

 

The issue is convincing a skewed “justice” system that he has a brain disorder. I recall when I first was allowed to visit him, he kept telling me to have them cut his brain out; that there’s something wrong with it. I’m frustrated by the lack of empathy within the justice system. Matthew didn’t choose this. He can’t help it. He has a BRAIN DISEASE, just like cancer or diabetes or any other disease. . .

 

How to Kill “the Monster in Our National Basement”—a Proposal

In my previous blog, I called for the abolishment of solitary confinement—“the monster in our national basement”–throughout America’s jails and prisons. I left the question open as to how this might be accomplished.

Detention Centres, Solitary Confinement. Credit publik15 via Flickr http://bit.ly/2v2Yf8F

I see one route, and one route only, toward this essential and long-overdue reform: enactment of a federal law that categorically bans solitary confinement in all federal, state, and local prisons, jails, and detention centers. The law would establish strong felony charges (I would stop short of solitary confinement) for wardens and guards who violate it.

The congressional bill calling for total abolishment should be bipartisan, and should be buttressed by as many signatories as possible.

The law should have a name, of course. I propose the Dorothea Dix Humanity Toward Prisoners Act.

I will enlarge on this remedy and its possible champions later in this essay.

It is true that recent years have seen several initiatives to curtail solitary confinement, which currently encages 80,000 to 100,000 American prisoners and inmates on a given day. They are well intentioned half-measures, and they are doomed to meaninglessness and failure. Half-measures will never be enough to eradicate this evil.

Dix-Dorothea-LOC
Dorothea Dix
Among the most publicized has been then-President Obama’s executive order in January 2016 to ban solitary for juveniles in federal prisons. The facts, however, virtually neutralize the order’s headline appeal. How many juveniles reside in the federal penal system? Fewer than thirty, according to a survey conducted by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit organization that monitors criminal justice. This is in contrast to the system’s total population of 197,000). https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/01/27/there-are-practically-no-juveniles-in-federal-prison-here-s-why#.lRlqKK4Kv

Nearly all juvenile offenders are sent to state prisons, or to local jails. Most of these are pre-trial detainees, trapped behind bars as they await trials that may be weeks, months, or years in the future.

USGS Rikers Island
Rikers Island By U.S. Geological Survey, conversion to PNG by uploader (Herr Satz). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A scandalous eighty-five percent of adolescents at the dreadful Rikers Island in New York—from a population that often approaches ten thousand daily—are pretrial detainees, most of whom simply cannot afford to pay bail for charges of petty crimes. Although this form of detention has been frequently challenged on constitutional grounds, it persists, with these young captives enjoying the same rights as convicted prisoners: the right to be separated indefinitely from their families; the right to be beaten and slashed by guards and fellow inmates; the right to kill themselves; and, of course, the right to solitary confinement and descent into madness (if they are not mad already, as twenty percent of the Rikers population typically is).

Kalief Browder. Credit Zach Gross

The single most notorious and crushing example of this, which I treat on pp. 150-151 of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, is the post-incarceration suicide of Kalief Browder, a promising young African-American man falsely accused of a crime and then packed off to Rikers for three years, two of which he spent in solitary, before being released. Browder was the subject of two piercing essays by Jennifer Gonnerman in the New Yorker, linked below:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-learned-how-to-commit-suicide-on-rikers

 

Few jails in America, or in history, are as dangerous to their inmates as Rikers. When guards manage to intervene in a suicide attempt, for instance, they often follow up by beating the inmate until his blood and urine flow. (To give credit where it is due, Mayor DeBlasio announced in 2014 that he had a plan to close Rikers. The plan would take ten years to implement. That’s nice. Maybe then he can start helping out on Guantanamo.) Across America, and with varying degrees of official brutality, the young, the mentally ill, and the un-tried are largely at the mercy of inept, negligent, or actively repressive wardens and jailers. As I wrote in my previous blog: “[O]ur state prisons—1,330,000 inmates strong—and our archipelago of county and local jails—with 630,000 behind bars at any given time, most of these young and unconvicted and awaiting trial—function under no such restrictions.”

Endemic in the United States, solitary confinement appears indifferent to a region’s general political values. It is the Monster Who Will Not Die—at least not until a stake is driven through its heart. Half-measures do not contemplate the stake. The federal government must.

 

California prides itself as being among the most progressive of states; yet it has ranked among the most promiscuous in the matter of bulldozing prisoners off for long stretches in “the Hole.” In the state’s charmingly named Pelican Bay State Prison alone, more than 500 prisoners had been held in solitary for more than 10 years, 78 of whom for more than 20. In all, the state held 9,870 prisoners in isolation in December 2012, when inmates, following the longest inmate hunger strike in California history to protest the practice, filed a prisoners’ lawsuit, Ashker vs. Governor. https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/08/2015-09-01-Ashker-settlement-summary.pdf Supported by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the suit was settled in the prisoners’ favor—pretty much—in 2015. Settlement terms resulted in the trimming down to 3,471 solitary prisoners as of August 2016, a 65 percent reduction. It greatly reduced the number of long-term solitary captives as well.

 

Prison officials had long justified solitary by pointing out the high percentage of gang members in their system. Gang-bangers’ influence was considered toxic, and dangerous, within the general prison population.

California’s enforced curtailing of “the Hole” is admirable, even pivotal, as far as it goes. The specter of gang members in the general population has not yet produced chaos: prison administrators have been obliged to seek other remedies, and they have worked. And for the hard-nosed among us, who believe that jailbirds deserve everything they get, here is a hard-nosed fact that may sway them: wiping out solitary confinement saves taxpayers’ money.

California Governor Jerry Brown’s 2016-2017 state budget stipulates a reduction of $28 million as a direct result of the jail and prison housing conversions.

As the nonprofit national watchdog group Solitary Watch has reported, citing the state’s Department of Corrections figures:

“The cost reductions are unsurprising given the long-reported high cost of isolating individuals in California’s prisons. In 2010-11. . .it cost $70,641 annually to hold prisoners in the SHU [Security Housing Unit]. . .In contrast, [spent] an average of $58,324 on general population prisoners.”

Solitary Watch continued: “As our fact sheet on the issue of cost points out, solitary confinement routinely costs more. One estimate put the average difference at as much as $50,000 a year, per-individual.” http://solitarywatch.com/2016/01/08/california-expects-to-save-28-million-by-reducing-solitary-confinement/

All of this is admirable; a promising, if woefully belated, start to the fulfillment of Dorothea Dix’s noble dream.

And yet, it remains just that: a start. A good intention. A half-measure, given the history of what too often happens to good intentions. As 2015 ended, 5,378  men and 199 women in remained in various forms of solitary in California. That is 5,577 solitary inmates too many.

Leahy2009
Patrick Leahy By Senate Judiciary Committee (http://judiciary.senate.gov/about/images/Leahy.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The most promising—well, half-measure—was introduced last October.  Five Democratic senators brought out a bill called the Solitary Reform Act (S. 3432), which would restrict solitary confinement for all federal prisoners, not just teenagers. The co-sponsors were Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Christopher Coons of Delaware, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Al Franken of Minnesota.

 

Once again: this proposal is enlightened as far as it goes, and in all likelihood reflects the senators’ understanding of the art of the possible, and its limitations. The legislation would free about ten thousand solitary inmates in federal prisons, roughly 6 percent of the total Yet it would not touch the oppression of the 70,000 people encaged in state prisons and county jails.

I believe that federal law must go much farther—all the way to the death of the monster in our national basement.

I believe that federal law must encompass not just federal prisons, but the very constitutionality of solitary confinement.

113th Congress Official Photo of Rep. Tim Murphy
Timothy F. Murphy By Timmurphy (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
I believe its sponsors should be bipartisan. Surely they must not exclude the Republican Congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, a trained child psychologist, who emerged last year as his party’s almost solitary champion of the mentally ill and their interests with his breakthrough CARES Act, which was incorporated into President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The Republican Senate majority whip John Cornyn, a doctrinaire conservative on many issues, has supported reform, and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor.

 

Joe Kennedy, Official Portrait, 113th Congress
Joe Kennedy III via Wikimedia Commons
Potential Democratic sponsors in addition to the five mentioned above might begin with the young Representative Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, who leapt into the headlines and television soundbites last March with his riveting and eloquent rebuke to Rep. Paul Ryan, who had called the (doomed) Republican replacement bill to Obamacare “an act of mercy.” “This is not an act of mercy, Kennedy snapped, after rattling off several tenets of the scripture. “It’s an act of malice.” Kennedy’s family, of course, has a long history of involvement in health care and mental-health care issues, and the Kennedy name on such a bill would give it great symbolic power.

Marcykaptur
Marcy Kaptur By Online Guide to House Members and Senators (Online Guide to House Members and Senators) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Finally—for purposes of this short list, anyway—I have admired the progressive zeal and compassion of the longtime Ohio Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who has been honored as a Legislator of the Year by the National Mental Health Association for her efforts in defending Medicaid funds for the mentally ill and for expanding insurance parity for such sufferers, and for initiatives to safeguard young people entering the juvenile justice system.

Any and all of these legislators would enhance the prospects of an eventual dispatching of the monster in our national basement.

I believe that such a law is especially urgent in these days of civic turmoil, street terror, collapse of faith in our institutions, widespread ignorance of or contempt for national traditions; even the irreducible dignity of our fellow human beings. Abolishing solitary confinement would do more than end an enduring national scourge. It would enshrine in history the crusade of the frail woman who concluded her timeless “Memorial” to the Massachusetts legislature back in 1843:

Gentlemen, I commit to you this sacred cause. Your action upon this subject will affect the present and future condition of hundreds and of thousands. In this legislation, as in all things, may you exercise that “wisdom which is the breath of the power of God.”

The full text of Dorothea Dix’s Memorial, with a brief explanatory, is here:

https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/democrac/15.htm

I will continue my discussion on solitary confinement when I return from a brief vacation. Please feel free to repost this.

We Must Kill the Monster of Solitary Confinement

Solitary confinement is the monster that lives in our nation’s basement.

We tell ourselves that we have the monster under control. That is, if we tell ourselves anything at all. Most of the time, we avoid thinking about him.

Cellule du quartier d'isolement de la prison Jacques-Cartier, à travers le judas, Rennes, France

Solitary confinement is just another tool, we assure ourselves. Like we assure ourselves that—oh—the AK-47 is just another appliance. Ethically neutral. Dangerous but necessary. Good to have around when you need it. Properly stored, properly maintained, properly et cetera.

Here is the difference between solitary confinement and the AK-47: solitary is worse. Solitary is inherently evil. Solitary has no utilitarian value. No economic value. No social-protection value. No ethical or moral value. Solitary has one consequence and one consequence only: the slow and torturous disintegration of the human mind.

Solitary confinement must be abolished in this country. Not “limited.” Not “scaled back.” Not “reviewed” or “studied.” Abolished. Dragged out of the basement and exterminated. Prohibited by federal law as cruel and unusual punishment. Crueler, if not more “unusual,” than waterboarding, which is brutish and unproductive, but brief, and usually without lasting destruction to the psyche.

Solitary confinement must be wiped out because of its very purity: it is the purest most unadulterated method of infesting a human brain with loneliness, then despair, then desperation, and finally with head-banging madness that the world has ever seen. Solitary confinement is a demon that feeds on human souls.

As it feeds, here is some of the residue that it leaves behind, to fester: Paranoia. Stupor. Amnesia. Hallucinations; imaginary shapes and voices. Rage. Suicidal impulses. (Half of all jail and prison suicides are committed in solitary or soon after release, though solitary inmates make up only 5 percent of these populations.)

Let’s pause here for a disquisition on what we mean when we say “solitary confinement”: small concrete cell, maybe 7 by 10 feet. Small bed and toilet or hole in floor for urination and defecation. Steel door with slot for sliding food in. Darkness.

End of disquisition.

If the public and its political leaders ignore this monster in the basement (or buffoonishly shrug it off  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/chris-christies-defense-of-solitary-confinement.html and https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/12/14/what-chris-christie-got-wrong-about-solitary-confinement#.HFGlWqlkR it isn’t because it’s a secret. Google “mental illness solitary confinement” and six hundred twenty-five thousand hits come up. They include thousands of studies, professional and academic, that overwhelmingly condemn the practice as a form of torture; as devastating to the brain; as falling below international standards of incarceration; unconstitutional; as an affront to decency.

A solitary confinement cell at the Cumberland County Jail, Portland (Joanna Walters)

The hits include newspaper and magazine journalism as well; and, occasionally, television. The most dignified journals sometimes season their reportage with language that would make an old-time yellow journalism copy editor blush. Here is the August British journal, The Guardian:

“After her son tore off his penis with his bare hands in his cell, Gemma Pena thought Florida’s prison authorities might see his illness,” began one such story, in the August Manchester Guardian. “They’d see he needed a hospital, instead of solitary confinement. The article continued:

“‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s when the nightmare really started.’

“As her son Kristopher has moved through Florida’s prison system; so has Pena, relocating around the state to stay close to him. Now she lives in a tiny one-room apartment in a run-down Miami neighborhood. There’s a bed, a small table, two chairs, and a little window. She keeps the door locked. She lives in a solitary confinement of her own.”

You may read the entire article via this link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/03/solitary-confinement-mentally-ill-prisoners-florida

The New York Times has returned time and again to attacking the abhorrent practice with probing news stories and editorial commentary. Here are links to Times pieces in recent months and years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/03/opinion/solitary-confinement-is-cruel-common-and-useless.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/03/opinion/solitary-confinement-is-cruel-common-and-useless.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/opinion/justice-kennedy-on-solitary-confinement.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/cruel-isolation-of-prisoners.html

Isolation exercise yard, Security Housing Unit, Pelican Bay, Crescent City, California, a supermax-type control, high security facility said to house California’s most dangerous prisoners. © Richard Ross

A sampling of other journalism on the topic barely scratches the surface. In July 26, 2006, Laura Sullivan of National Public Radio produced a valuable timeline: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5579901

In 2009, the respected advocacy journalist Brooke Shelby Biggs, writing in the progressive bi-monthly Mother Jones, offered a social history of American solitary confinement. Her consummately researched essay should be reviewed by anyone interested in the subject.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/solitary-confinement-brief-natural-history/

Biggs reminded us, for instance, of the fact that “solitary” is not some primitive artifact of 14th-century “Bedlam Asylum.” It is a fairly recent demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, wrought by the most pacifistic religious order in the Western World. In 1790, the Society of Friends (the Quakers) completed work on the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia—the first edifice of the modern prison system. The Quakers conceived the newly evolving prison system as a vehicle not only for punishment but for spiritual rehabilitation. Hence “penitentiary,” denoting penitence. Solitary confinement was refined, at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, as the highest distillation of the penitent act. It was not long, though, before evidence began to show that these isolated souls, instead of discovering peace through reverence, were going mad.

Biggs writes:

“Eastern State was a grand failure, and it was closed in 1971, 100
years after the concept of total isolation was abandoned. But what it
revealed about the torturous effects of solitary may have made the
practice attractive to those less concerned with rehabilitation and
more interested in retribution. Solitary in the 20th century became a
purely punitive tool used to break the spirits of inmates considered
disruptive, violent, or disobedient. . .”

And that is more or less where things stand today.

In 2014, Pope Francis described such confinement as a form of torture. By the following year, more than 80,000 inmates, a high percentage of them already mad, were stored in solitary, more than in any other country. The numbers had been rising before that. From 1995 to 2000, the solitary confinement population in America increased by 40 percent.  These figures exclude juveniles, who comprise the most inexcusable of all solitary confinement populations—in jails, mostly, awaiting hearings and trials. Adolescent brains, even “healthy” ones, are in a final stage of development that leaves them vulnerable to disruption, especially that caused by stress. (see NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, pp. 34-38). If the “right”—that is, the wrong—genetic inheritance is present, this is the age when schizophrenia develops.

Well, then, if solitary is so awful, why do inmates and prisoners keep getting stored away there?

The most rational defense of the practice that I’ve found is protection: the protection of one prisoner from others that want to do harm to him or her. Or to protect other prisoners from one dangerously violent individual.

But what’s that, you say? Dangerously violent individuals deserve what they get? Let’s keep in mind that up to half of some prison populations suffer severe mental illness; that these illnesses are not treated during solitary (nor, too often, out of solitary either), and that this kind of caging deepens and even creates psychosis. Who benefits when such a brain-damaged entity is placed in, and finally allowed out of, this confinement?

And if “protection” is the rationale, why not simply create an additional regulation-sized and lighted cell or two for that purpose?

The second-most rational defense concerns “discipline.” In fact, this is the only other remotely rational defense.

But “discipline”—and its justifications—are in the eye of the jailer. Which is very bad news for the disciplined. The range of “justifications” is nearly endless, exotic, and often the product of a clueless or sadistic jail official.

Sure, there are “policies.” Good ones, often. In January 2016, President Obama issued executive orders to ban solitary for juveniles in federal prisons, with their total population of some 197,000. Yet our state prisons—1,330,000 inmates strong—and our archipelago of county and local jails—with 630,000 behind bars at any given time, most of these young and unconvicted and awaiting trial—function under no such restrictions.

At these levels, little accountability exists to enforce the “policies” restricting solitary. In that breach, here is a tiny sampling of the reasons sending inmates into “the Box”:

To “teach a lesson.” To punish someone for “talking back.” For “failing to speak English when able.” To separate fighting inmates—seldom minding who was the aggressor. For refusing to attend church services. For trying to translate for another detainee. (These examples are taken from the Introduction to “Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, The New Press, February 2016, https://longreads.com/2016/02/09/a-brief-history-of-solitary-confinement/)

And often, for reasons unexplained: the mother of a young, psychotic inmate in Florida, with whom I have been communicating since last autumn, claims that her son has done stretches in solitary for as long as nine months. What possible offense could merit confinement in “the hole” for nine months? Florida, by the way, boasts—if that is the word—more than 12,000 isolated inmates: one-eighth of the total in America.

Angola Three event, Manchester Metropolitan University, November 2016 (05)
Albert Woodfox
Long stretches in the tight darkness such as this one seem impossible to believe—until you learn that that a man named Albert Woodfox, a former Black Panther arrested for robbery in 1969, was released only in 2016, having served more than forty years in solitary. For those keeping score, this is a United States record.

I suspect a further reason, a reason that underlies the absurdist reasons listed above. I suspect it even though I find little empirical evidence to back me up. I suspect that wardens and guards throw prisoners into solitary out of fear. The same kind of fear that slave owners once harbored toward their slaves. And stemming from the same reasons.

Solitary confinement, in other words, is used to fight fear with fear.

Solitary confinement is the monster that lives in our nation’s basement.

We tell ourselves that we have the monster under control. That is, if we tell ourselves anything at all. Most of the time, we avoid thinking about him.

In my next blog post, I will discuss what I believe is the only hope for exterminating the monster.

 

 

The Tall Girl Comes Home

In Chapter 3, “Regulars” (pp. 34-35) of NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE, I write about a gallant intervention against a schoolyard bully that my late son Kevin made in the sixth grade, while we were living in Middlebury, Vermont. The passage is below:

 

A quality in Kevin that I admired perhaps even more than I admired his musical gifts can be summed up in a story I heard about him at his memorial service.

The story was told to me by a classmate of his, a beautiful young woman with long, thick, curly dark tresses and dark eyes. In sixth grade she had experienced one of those rare kidhood growth-spurts that almost overnight set her apart from everybody else. She topped out at six feet. Her height and beauty, neither of which she could understand, much less control, put her in the cross-hairs of certain boys in the class. She never invited this: her family was poor, her mother single, and she came to school in faded jeans and flannel shirts, or T-shirts with “cool” slogans. Just a kid in grade school.

One boy in particular seemed to take her innocently stunning appearance as some kind of personal reflection on him, or challenge. The boy was built thick and tough; he was on a track to star as a college ice-hockey player. His method for dealing with her daring to be tall was to swagger up to her on the school grounds before classes or at lunch hour, and punch her. Repeatedly. Hard. On her shoulders. On her chest. Sometimes in her face. She bruised, and she bled, but she didn’t know what to do. She stood there and took it. Sometimes the pain and humiliation made her cry silently. Other kids watched from a distance. No kid made an effort to intervene. No teacher, apparently, was aware what was happening. And the girl never told anyone.

This all stopped when Kevin walked up to the two of them one day while the punching was going on and said: “Patrick, you’re being a dick,” and walked away. Patrick did not go after him. It was as if he said to himself, “Yeah—I guess I’m a dick.” He grew up to be a pretty good guy. And a college hockey star.

It’s not for me to say, but I think the tall girl loved Kevin. Who didn’t?

Last week, the Tall Girl came back home to Vermont.

Her name is Leah. She has been living in Ireland for the last several years. She’d graduated the University of Vermont with a degree in gender and women’s studies, studies, married a boyfriend, and followed him to Cork, the graceful small city on the coastal southwest, bisected by the River Lee.

Another child; then divorce.

Leah found a community of young musicians (coincidence? Maybe!), did some radio announcing, and took up a career as a songwriter. She has never stopped thinking about my son.

I drove up from Castleton to Middlebury to meet her—she makes an annual trip home to visit her mother—and we had lunch on the deck of a riverside restaurant on a balmy midsummer afternoon. Leah is in her early 30s now, but she has not changed dramatically from her year in sixth grade, 1996. Nor from her appearance at the memorial service for Kevin in July of 2005. She had long since replaced the faded jeans and flannel shirts; she was wearing a chic summer dress and heels. She was no longer a gangly skinny kid, but the essential Leah was still fully present. She wore her lustrous black hair long and in curls, as she had through her difficult childhood. She spoke easily and warmly (I heard traces of an Irish accent); but her expressive dark eyes tended to drift, as if she were halfway inside a world known only to her.

I learned some new things from Leah as we talked.

I learned that it had been not one boy but two who assaulted her daily on the playground until Kevin walked up. The boys had beaten her arms and her face, often drawing blood. They had jumped up and down on her feet. They had spat in her face.

I learned that it was not true that teachers were unaware of what was happening. They were aware, all right. They just didn’t do anything about it.

I learned that the school playground was not the only place where Leah had suffered. She’d been tormented inside and outside the school. Once, the first bully grabbed Leah’s thick hair in both hands and dragged her out of her classroom seat by it. Another time, the two attacked her in front of the principal’s office.

In fact, Leah suffered more or less continually as a child. She led a life of quiet desperation. Her impoverished household was a version of Hell. Her mother had done her best to keep things together, but she was disabled and emotionally fragile and often needed tending from Leah. The father, a hard and scowling man, brooded over the family until Leah’s mother worked up the will to leave him. He died year ago.

I learned that Kevin was her savior, and not only on the day he confronted Patrick.

“The only reason I kept going to school was Kevin,” she told me as she studied the river. “He was the only good thing in my life. My mother would rant and rage as she drove me to school. But as soon as I got out of the car, there was Kevin, and we would start laughing right away. He could always make me laugh. He was so funny!”

Leah told of Kevin’s talent for mimicking other people—teachers, classmates. It was a gift that we’d noticed around the house, as well. Often, we noticed it while wincing.

She stuck around him. He seemed happy to have her company. Yet they never so much as held hands. Kevin may not have been aware of her adoration. Or he didn’t know what to do with it. He was just a kid. So was Leah.

They remained friends for three more years, through middle school. Kevin’s guitar talents were earning him a reputation by then.

In the fall of 1997, when Kevin was freshly 14, we entered him in his first competition, simply to get him some experience in that pressurized world. The competition was the formidable Down Beat Magazine’s annual student music awards. Kevin sat in our living room, one foot propped on the arch of the other, his ball cap on backwards; and, using retail mics and soundboard, recorded three tunes in each of two genres, jazz and rock. His choices were challenging and sophisticated. In the jazz category, he tackled “Blue Monk” by Thelonius Monk, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Fats Waller, and “Satin Doll” by Billy Strayhorn. In blues, he submitted “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker, “The Thrill Is Gone” by B.B. King, and “Tore Down” by Sonny Thompson. The submissions were multi-track dubs, in which Kevin performed lead, rhythm, and, on some of the tunes, harmony and a bass line off his electric guitar.

We sent the submissions in, after warning him not to get his hopes up. This was just for experience.

The following June, Down Beat announced its winners. Kevin had won for his age-group in both his categories. He got his picture in the local paper.

Kevin never preened or strutted after these awards. That would not have been Kevin. He was proud; it showed at the corners of his mouth; but he didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what, if anything, passed between him and Leah concerning his new local celebrity. Probably not much, if I know my late son. They continued their friendship.

Kevin at Interlochen

Life began to pull them apart shortly after that. Kevin found to his delight that he had been accepted into the prestigious Interlochen Academy for the Arts in Traverse City, Michigan. He would take up his studies in the autumn of 1998. I would drive him the eight hundred miles from Middlebury to Montreal, then west along the majestic Trans Canada Highway to Sault Ste. Marie, and then south through pine forests that bordered the highway to the new home that would nurture and gladden him for the next three years.

“I knew that he had to go to Interlochen, and I was happy for him,” Leah told me. Kevin never mentioned the relationship, nor the parting. He was an intensely private young man.

“I was proud of him. Happy for him,” Leah told me.

I had taken out my camera to make some photographs of her, then put it down. It was when the talk turned to Kevin’s departure from Middlebury that Leah’s eyes filled.

My camera remained on the table between us. I’d made a few photos of her at the start of her meal. And now I wanted to lift the camera again and focus on Leah’s teary eyes. It would have been so easy, and her tears would have symbolized the closing of a circle between these beautiful young people.

But I could not do it. I could not bring myself to violate this private moment.

Leah told me as we said good-bye that she had noticed my hands hovering near the camera. She told me that it would have been all right with her.

But it would not be all right with me. Not with Kevin watching. Which I felt he was.

I left the camera lying on the table between us. I will be happy for the remainder of my life that I refrained from intruding on Leah’s private moment of grief.

And I will regret for the remainder of my life that I left my camera lying.

~

HERE IS KEVIN PLAYING “MY ROMANCE”

Thank you, Deb Fabos, for posting this

Civil Rights Groups File Suit on Behalf of Man Intentionally Denied Mental Health Treatment in Jail, Man Was Abused by Tangipahoa Prison Officials

via ACLU.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Ronald K. Lospennato, Advocacy Center 504-208-4679

NEW ORLEANS – Two civil rights organizations, the Advocacy Center and the ACLU of Louisiana, joined forces to file a lawsuit today on behalf of Dennis Bargher, who, while suffering from schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses, was held at Tangipahoa Parish Jail (TPJ) for nearly two years without treatment.  The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

TPJ officials knew that Mr. Bargher was severely mentally ill, that a court had ordered his treatment with prescription medications, and that without treatment, Bargher would quickly descend into psychosis. Despite that, they refused to treat him, held him in solitary confinement for weeks and months at a time, and denied him food until he had lost nearly half his body weight. Bargher’s abuse at the hands of jail officials continued for almost two years until late 2011, when he was discovered – psychotic, emaciated and enfeebled – by civil rights groups and transferred to a different facility.

Miranda Tait, an attorney for the Advocacy Center said “prison conditions are very hard on inmates with mental illness. Conditions of overcrowding, violence, lack of privacy, lack of meaningful activities, isolation from friends and family, and uncertainty about life after prison affect all inmates. These conditions are especially difficult for people with mental illness. The intentional withholding of medical treatment, with callous disregard for the inmate’s medical needs, is tantamount to torture”

According to Marjorie Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana, “Under the Constitution, prisons are obligated to provide inmates with adequate medical care, including mental health care. Officials cannot abuse or neglect inmates, deny prisoners essential treatment or allow offenders to physically and mentally waste away simply out of contempt or because they don’t understand the disease.”

With few psychiatric services available to the public, people with mental illness are increasingly funneled into a criminal justice system that is ill-equipped to address their treatment needs.  Hundreds of thousands of men and women in U.S. jails and prisons suffer from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. “It’s past time for us to provide adequate care for those with illnesses,” continued Esman. “Dennis Barger was wrongly denied that care, and suffered greatly as a result.” Representing Dennis Bargher are Miranda Tait and Ronald Lospennato of the Advocacy Center, ACLU of Louisiana Senior Staff Attorney Justin Harrison, and ACLU Cooperating Attorney Ron Wilson.

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/

Facebook
Facebook
TWITTER
Visit Us
Follow Me
Follow by Email
RSS