Suit claims Pa. prison system inflicts cruel, unusual punishment on mentally ill

By Maiken Scott
Newsworks
Originally published March 11, 2013

The Disability Rights Network is suing the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, claiming that housing seriously mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement is unconstitutional.

In the lawsuit, the advocacy organization claims about 800 Pennsylvania prisoners with severe mental illnesses are incarcerated in "restricted housing units," where they dwell in small, single cells for at least 23 hours a day, with the lights on the entire time. The suit calls this cruel and unusual punishment.

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Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections would not comment on the suit, but officials said that of the state's 51,300 prisoners, about 20 percent are known to have mental health issues.

The entire article is here.

Forced medication of Jared Lee Loughner OK'd by court

By Carol J. Williams

Los Angeles Times

Originally published March 5, 2012

Jared Lee Loughner

Reporting from Los Angeles — Tucson shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner can be forcibly medicated with antipsychotic drugs, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said prison authorities have the right to treat an inmate who would otherwise be a danger to himself or others around him.

Loughner, 23, has been charged with 49 felony counts in the Jan. 8, 2011, shooting rampage outside of a Tucson supermarket in which six people were killed and 13 others injured, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The congresswoman was holding a meet-the-public event when the shooter attacked.

Loughner’s defense attorneys had objected to his being forcibly treated with antipsychotic drugs. They argued that because he is a pretrial detainee who has not been convicted of any crime that he has the right to refuse medication that he believes could harm or kill him.

The entire article is here.

Prosecutors Allowed Access to Loughner Notes

By Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic

The judge in the Tucson mass shooting case has ruled that prosecutors can have access to notes made by Jared Loughner's prison psychologist over the course of her evaluations of his mental health.

The suspected shooter is undergoing restoration to competency at a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., and his lawyer asked that federal prosecutors be denied access to the psychologist's notes because of self-incriminating statements Loughner made during sessions with psychologist Christina Pietz.

The entire story is here.

Ethics, Psychology, and the Prison Mess

Stephen A. Ragusea, PsyD, ABPP

Guest Blogger

Recently on one of my psychology list serves, one colleague posted the following, 

“I witnessed an inmate in a county jail who was acutely psychotic, and was kept in solitary confinement for almost two years, naked, lying in his/her own urine and feces. There was no heat in the cell, and the human wastes leaked into adjoining cells. Numerous official and professional persons were aware of this poor person's plight, and no one did anything (or at least anything that was within their ability and authority) to end the inmate's suffering. Apparently, this is acceptable practice here in Florida, as all persons were found to be practicing appropriately.”

Unfortunately, the situation described above by one of our colleagues is not uncommon.  In my many years of work in prisons I’ve observed similar scenarios many times.  I too have scene naked prisoners lying in their own filth.  I’ve seen prisons where an entire block of 40 men was on suicide watch.  I’ve seen a prisoner who was elderly, demented, and paranoid sent to prison repeatedly after being prosecuted for making “Terroristic Threats.”  I’ve seen a psychotic bipolar prisoner tied to a metal chair and drenched with a fire hose to make him “behave.”

Dr. Ragusea

As has been true for more than two decades, the United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world.  Most prisoners are under the age of 30 and approximately 15% of the total are people who meet the DSM-IV criteria for a mental illness.  About half of that 15% are diagnosable as seriously mentally ill, suffering from problems like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder.

According to a 215-page report (ISBN: 1564322904) by Human Rights Watch, “One in six U.S. prisoners is mentally ill. Many of them suffer from serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.”  One of the report’s authors, Jamie Felner, observed, “Prisons have become the nation’s primary mental health facilities.” 

Prisons have become the nation’s primary mental health facilities.

How did we get into this mess?  Some of it started when politicians decided that they could get elected and stay elected by being “tough on crime.”  They voted for mandatory minimum sentences, taking discretion away from the judiciary.  And, although approximately half of these prisoners were convicted of non-violent, drug related offenses, rather than voting for funding to pay for alcohol and drug treatment, our elected officials decided to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on building more prisons.  The result of this national movement was that we currently incarcerate approximately 1% of our population.  More than 2.5 million Americans now live behind bars.  That’s the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the cities of Philadelphia, Columbus, and Seattle.

A few years ago the Tallahassee Democrat reported, “Florida's law enforcement and corrections systems are rapidly evolving into the state's de facto mental health treatment providers. More often than not, our law enforcement officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and parole officers are being forced to serve as the first responders and overseers of a system ill equipped to deal with an underfunded treatment system that's stretched beyond capacity.”

To a large degree, the tax money for building and operating prisons was stolen from our public mental health system.  Part of John Kennedy’s vision for Camelot included a national system of well-funded community mental health centers that would serve the mentally ill in their own hometowns, thereby permitting the closing of a well-developed system of state mental hospitals that had been providing inpatient treatment for the severely mentally ill.  Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s recall an era of widely available, well funded, mental health care provided through local Community Mental Health Centers.  Oddly enough, the systematic under-funding and disempowering of our Mental Health Centers coincided with the increase in funding of the prison system to support the “Get Tough on Crime” movement that spread like a well-intentioned plague from sea to shining sea.

Psychologists should be leading the battle for prison reform.  I would argue that we have an ethical obligation to do so.  Specifically I reference the preamble of our ethical code, which states:As doctors of behavior, academic psychologists should be researching new solutions to our social problem of crime and punishment.  Clinical psychologists who work in the system should be developing and implementing alternative treatment models for the imprisoned mentally ill.  And, all psychologists should be demanding government action to correct this inhumane, ill-conceived, foolishness.  Can you imagine a hundred thousand psychologists remaining passively silent as 275,000 mentally ill Americans are mistreated?   We are.   Can you imagine America’s psychologists saying nothing as prisons are turned into “the nation’s primary mental health facilities?”  We have.

Psychologists are committed to increasing scientific and professional knowledge of behavior and people’s understanding of themselves and others and to the use of such knowledge to improve the condition of individuals, organizations, and society.  Psychologists respect and protect civil and human rights and the central importance of freedom of inquiry and expression in research, teaching, and publication.  They strive to help the public in developing informed judgments and choices concerning human behavior.

If you think these issues are important, say so to the leadership of your state and national Psychological Associations.  Talk to your elected representatives.  Contribute your time and energy to make things change.

We can do better. It is our ethical responsibility as psychologists to do better.

References

American Psychological Association. (2002). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist,Vol. 57, 1060-1073. 

Johnson, Suzanne Bennett.  Quotation retrieved from her website at http://sbjforapa.com/statements/response-to-abpp.

If you have specific suggestions for topics to be covered in The Ethics Corner, please e-mail me with your suggestions.  My e-mail address is ragusea@aol.com.