Putting mentally ill and possibly delusional prisoners in solitary confinement is torture, no more, no less. We were all shocked and shamed by the disgustingly inhumane treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Should we not be equally shocked by the disgustingly inhumane torture of mentally ill prisoners here at home?

Margot Kidder, actress and political activist

Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (MHASC) is a growing coalition of more than sixty organizations and hundreds of family members, formerly incarcerated individuals, advocates, and mental health professionals working to end the cruel and inhuman practice of placing people with psychiatric disabilities in solitary confinement in the prisons of New York State.
The mentally ill are already alone.  They live in a world that is broken, terrorized, and desperately alone.  Putting such people who are already shattered into solitary confinement is unnecessary cruelty.  It is the rust on the razor which threatens the throat.  They need health, at best, and human company at least.

Maya Angelou, best-selling author of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Men and women who are placed in solitary confinement in special housing units, called the SHU, endure brutal conditions. They are deprived of social contact, starved of sensory stimulation, denied adequate medical care, and forced to spend sometimes extremely long periods—meaning years—in cramped, dimly lit cells in a stated of enforced idleness. The result is greatly worsened symptoms, which cause the kind of behavior that sent these vulnerable individuals to the SHU in the first place.
[The solitary confinement of mentally ill prisoners is] a horrific problem, where life itself becomes a grueling punishment and too often an unbearable torture.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
for African and African American Research
and chair of Harvard University's
Department of African and African American Studies

Solitary confinement is known to cause mental breakdown in normally healthy individuals. For people with psychiatric conditions, it can only be called torture, with self-injury and, sadly, suicide being the all-too-common result.

There are few practices in modern America that are more barbaric than our jailing of people who suffer from mental illness, many of whom do not receive appropriate clinical interventions, do not have the control of their illness that such interventions might enable, and are left desperate and incoherent to the worst of prison abuses.

Mental illness and the regimented life of prison do not sit comfortably together. Prisoners with mental illness will be seen as aggressive, troubled, and inchoate. These qualities are frustrating to the guards whose duty it is to monitor such prisoners. They result in ever-stronger disciplinary measures. This is horrible for all concerned. Treating such prisoners for their mental health complaints would improve the quality of their lives; of the lives of other prisoners; and of the lives of the guards. It would also be humane and decent.

It would be horrible to have an overpowering psychological impetus to commit criminal acts; there is no need to compound that horror with solitary confinement, a state that would drive even the most sane among us close to the edge.

Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner
and Pulitzer Prize nominee for the best-selling 
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
and board member of the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign

Currently, MHASC is working with state legislators to pass In 2006, a law that would prohibit solitary confinement and offer mental health treatment for incarcerated individuals with psychiatric disabilities was passed by a wide margin in the New York State Assembly and unanimously in the Senate. However, New York State's former governor, George E. Pataki, vetoed the bill.

Solitary confinement of mentally ill prisoners is archaic and only aggravates difficulties for all concerned.  Psychotic and paranoid inmates become more psychotic and paranoid when placed in solitary. Individuals with major depression will deteriorate with a greater likelihood of become suicidal. For the mentally ill, their condition often precludes comprehending the purpose of such confinement in the first place. Frequently, the disturbing behavior leading to placement in solitary confinement is a manifestation of mental disorder and not a willful disobedience toward authority. Psychiatric management is more likely to lead to improved behavior than the use of harsh punishment.

To help inmates, we must begin to provide quality mental health services within our neglected so-called houses of correction.  Mental health care is critical to facilitating prisoners' successful reentry to society. In addition, inmates need appropriate follow-up services to ease adaptation to the outside world.

Placing inmates with mental illnesses in solitary confinement is inhumane, representing the antithesis of good mental health and treatment practices.

Alvin F. Poussaint, MD, director of the Media Center
of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston,
professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
and coauthor of Lay My Burden Down:
Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis
Among African-Americans

The legislation (S333/A4870) has now been passed by the New York State legislature. MHASC remains determined to see this legislation become law. Further mental suffering, self-mutilation, and death must be prevented. MHASC invites you to join us in this campaign.

To learn about MHASC, contact:

Alexandra Smith
Urban Justice Center
123 Williams Street, 16th floor
(646) 602-5683
ASmith@urbanjustice.org

End Solitary Confinement
for People with Psychiatric Disabilities!