(Sept. 11, 2014) Mentally ill inmates at Michigan’s only women’s prison are “deprived of food and water for days and hog tied naked as punishment,” detail eyewitness reports complied by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (“Mentally ill inmates at Michigan’s women’s prison report they were hog tied naked, deprived of water,” ThinkProgress, Sept. 8).
Inmates with mental illness “are being treated so inhumanely that we believe many corrections experts would characterize their experience as a form of torture,” the ACLU said. One inmate was “crying naked on the floor and unable to move because her feet were cuffed to her hands behind her back.”
The abuses occurred against inmates in solitary confinement in particular, which “punishes people for having a brain disorder and then exacerbates their conditions by creating an environment that is totally inconsistent with effective therapy,” the Mental Health Association of Michigan told ThinkProgress.
Reports of abuse of mentally ill inmates at the hands of corrections officers are becoming far too normal. While shocking, these eyewitness reports are no longer surprising.
In April, the Treatment Advocacy Center noted that the consequences of failing to treat mentally ill inmates are “usually harmful and sometimes tragic.” Without proper intervention and treatment, symptoms worsen of mental illness often worsen, leaving inmates vulnerable to victimization and other abuses.
The same report also found there are now ten times more individuals with serious mental illness in prisons and jails than there are in mental institutions.
Until we resolve to use proven diversion tactics, or provide court-ordered treatment before people with serious mental illness end up in jail in the first place, we will continue to see reports that mentally ill inmates are enduring practices that the Justice Department have deemed “cruel and unusual.”
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