(July 16, 2014) Seventy-seven percent of inmates injured in attacks at Rikers had a diagnosed mental illness, report journalists Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz for the New York Times (“Rikers, where mental illness meets brutality in jail,” July 14).
The growing number of mentally ill inmates is a major contributing factor to the escalating levels of violence at Rikers, Winerip and Schwirtz say. But Rikers is also not equipped to handle this surge of mentally ill inmates. Supervision is provided by officials who are not trained mental health professionals and “instead rely on pepper spray, take-down holds and fists to subdue them.”
Inmates with mental illness are also especially vulnerable in the harsh environment of incarceration. They are “often the weakest in a kind of war of all against all, preyed upon by correction officers and other inmates.”
“There’s lots of brutality,” said Daniel Selling, the former director of the jail’s mental health services. “Horrible brutality.”
This horrific brutality should hardly come as a surprise. With 12,200 inmates, Rikers Island Jail in New York City is the largest de facto “mental institution” in New York and prison workers “complain that they do not have the tools to properly care for inmates with mental health problems.”
Complicating the problem is that many of the inmates who need treatment the most are left untreated, according to a Treatment Advocacy Center study which found that New York is one of the most difficult places for prisoners with severe mental illness to receive involuntary treatment. Without proper treatment, systems are likely to worsen.
Until we maintain a functional public mental health treatment system, people with mental illness will continue to languish in jails and prisons with staff that are ill prepared to handle mental illness.
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