Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness by Alisa Roth

Author:Alisa Roth [Roth, Alisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: law, psychiatry, nonfiction
ISBN: 9780465094202
Google: 934dDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B074M6FZXQ
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT TO prison, Jamie Wallace had a history of hurting himself; he had been a cutter for years. It’s a morbid thing to say, but there is something impressive about the sheer creativity of the ways that Jamie Wallace found to try to hurt himself in prison. Maybe it was just experience.10 Or maybe it was desperation.

Every few months and sometimes more frequently, he found a violent way to harm himself. There was the time when he was sad about some family issues. “I opened the light,” he said. “I opened the light fixture, busted the lightbulb that was in there, took the lightbulb out, and broke it on the ground.” He used the glass to cut both sides of his neck. The following year, he used a chicken bone to cut his arm. “I sharpened it on the floor,” he said. “See, the floor is made out of concrete in our cells. You can take a chicken bone, you can file it to a point and cut yourself or stab yourself.”11 Then there were the times when he filed the metal part of a pencil—the silver ring that holds the eraser in place—to cut his arm. The time he jumped off the sink and hit his head. The time he bit his arm so badly that he had to be taken to the hospital.

“He always showed me where he had hurt himself last,” said one of the civil rights attorneys who worked with him extensively to prepare for the class-action lawsuit. “Some people would say he wanted attention. He wanted someone to care, so yes, he wanted attention. He was in a lot of pain, and he needed help.” What he got instead was punishment. He was regularly put into disciplinary segregation—though, ironically, he said that he was never moved to another cell; he just lost privileges while remaining where he was. Twenty-one days, or thirty days, or forty-five days where he wasn’t allowed to have visitors or use the phone or buy stuff from the canteen.

Wallace once took the metal top off a can of smokeless tobacco, somehow tore it in half, and used one side to cut himself. He hid the other half in his rectum to use another time. On this occasion, he said he cut himself because he was angry that he had lost visiting privileges: “I did that because I wasn’t able to see my daddy that month because they put a disciplinary on me,” he said. He got another disciplinary ticket for cutting himself.

There is extensive research showing that keeping prisoners connected to family and to community more generally is one of the best ways to ease reentry once they’re released and to prevent recidivism. This is especially true for people with mental illness. Yet loss of visiting privileges is a common consequence of breaking rules, even for people with mental illness. In Michigan and Florida, among other places, refusing to take medication is considered a rule violation, no matter what the motive.

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