Posts Tagged ‘solitary confinement and mental health effects’


Same Narrative, Different Players

Anne — March 25, 2013 @ 4:50 PM — Comments (0)

Final installment in a 3-part commentary on Solitary Confinement. Read Part I here and Part II here.

If anyone were to ask Anthony Graves and Stephen Slevin what they have in common, the two men might automatically respond to the basic facts of their previous incarceration, subsequent release from prison and jail, respectively, and of their ultimate receipt of funds from their respective states for crimes committed against them.

Their commonality, however, is more significant than their incarcerations and subsequent freedoms.

While Anthony Graves,  incarcerated  in a Texas prison for nearly two decades for a crime he did not commit, emerged a free man, his imprisonment affected him in ways only he can fully acknowledge. Speaking before a Senate Judiciary Committee on solitary confinement in June 2012, he relayed in great detail the psychological, emotional and physical horrors visited upon prisoners confined to solitary confinement. Eye-gouging, skin-cutting and other forms of self-mutilations only partially describe the horrors of solitary confinement, the systematic practice of segregating prisoners deemed a danger to themselves and/or other prisoners. Listening to Anthony Graves speak of the psychological effects of solitary confinement is painful. He is the one, however, who lives with the memories only those on the outside can imagine. Difficulties with sleeping are only one of the many consequences he faces as a “free” man. Even though he is no longer behind bars, his freedom comes with–and at–a price: revolving nightmares of his incarceration. Graves’ freedom is, as he described during the Senate hearings, is a journey of caution, one which he must carefully navigate one step at a time.

While Stephen Slevin’s circumstances differ slightly from Anthony Graves’ walk to freedom, their paths are eerily similar.

In August 2005, while driving through Dona Ana County, New Mexico, with no specific destination in mind, Slevin was arrested on a DWI charge and for driving a vehicle that did not belong to him. From the point of his arrest and subsequent transfer to the county’s detention enter, his nightmare began. Never officially charged with committing a crime, he also never had  a trial, languishing in jail for 22 months. From the moment of his detainment, his association with human contact was limited. Initially placed in a padded cell on the jail’s floor–wearing only a “suicide smock”–Slevin faced the first of two impending transfers following a few weeks of medical examination at the facility. While prison policy dictated open showering with other inmates, he was administratively placed in an “observation cell,” which contained its own shower, toilet and a window. The amenities were not, however, due to the goodness and graciousness of jail officials; the services were provided for the purpose of observing Mr. Slevin on a 24/7 basis. Following the assignment of his “private quarters” he was eventually transferred to solitary confinement where, until his release from jail, he remained.

In view of Slevin’s placement, controversy surrounds (to this day) his placement in a 6-by-11 foot cell. With little to no outside contact, his mental health began to deteriorate. Matt Coyte, Slevin’s attorney, who worked tirelessly over the years to free him, said that prison policy dictates that mentally ill inmates be placed in administrative segregation. Not so, according to Jess Williams, Dona Ana County’s public information director. According to Williams, Slevin was administratively placed at his (Slevin’s) request, because, according to the director, Slevin did not wish to be placed in the prison’s general population, that upon an opportunity to join the general population in a cell block with a day room, he refused. The remaining (and only option, according to Williams) was to place Slevin in one of the facility’s 28 solitary confinement cells.

In January 2006, three months after placement in solitary confinement, Slevin began exhibiting delirious behavior. Previously able to compose letters to his sister as well as correspondence to jail officials in appeal of medical attention, he informed jail officials of his inability to sleep and began experiencing panic attacks. According to Coyte, Slevin began a slow mental decline, exhibiting constant rocking, back and forth, in his cell. Other medical conditions arose during his incarceration as well. While he was given food and provided medication during his incarceration, other behaviors and conditions, attributed to his confinement, arose: He quit bathing, fungus grew on his skin, his toenails grew to such lengths they began to curl, and he was in need of dental work. The pain of a decaying tooth drove him to self-extract the tooth. According to his attorney, Slevin “began to decay, essentially, as a human being.”

Photographs of the former inmate, from the time of his arrest to his subsequent release in 2007, show a man nearly unrecognizable from his 2005 booking photo. His face, noticeably drawn, was shadowed by long, thinning gray hair; where no facial hair presented itself in the initial photo, a bushy, flowing, gray beard, reached his chest. Slumped shoulders beneath orange jail attire added to his desolate look. If the eyes are a window to one’s soul, Stephen Slevin’s vacant stare into the camera was a defeatist’s gaze. In an interview conducted with NBC News on March 6, 2013, Coyte reiterated Slevin’s state of mind and health, emphasizing that Slevin’s mental health “has been severely compromised from the time he was in that facility . . . [that] no amount of money will bring back what they took from him.” Based on substantial reports of Slevin’s 22 month incarceration, few will argue with the attorney’s assessment.

While the charges against Stephen Slevin were eventually dropped in 2007, Don Ana County, New Mexico has settled a claim filed in federal court for Slevin’s ordeal. It is one of the largest prisoner civil rights payouts in U. S. history, and if final numbers matter, the judicial disaster amounts to high figures: $22 million awarded to Slevin; $15.5 million agreed upon in a final settlement; $9.5 million from county coffers (in other words, taxpayers will foot the bill) ; 22 months in which Slevin was held in legal limbo, and no county official has thus far been held accountable for the injustice inflicted upon him.

Due to court-imposed settlements awarded Anthony Graves and Stephen Slevin, each man may have a chance of rebuilding their lives following the egregious actions perpetrated against them. No amount of financial settlements, however, can remove the memories and experiences that each endured at the hands of an unjust legal system. A fervent advocate against the practice of solitary confinement, Anthony Graves is a forceful orator overseeing a non-profit organization, “Anthony Believes,” that addresses injustices in the penal justice system. His support of prisoners’ rights takes him on speaking engagements throughout the country where his voice is clear, honest and straightforward. Even though Stephen Slevin is, like Anthony Graves, a “free” man, his current battle with lung cancer (not evidenced by his lack of proper medical treatment in prison) is his first priority.

While we wish Stephen Slevin well and hope that he will overcome his battle with cancer, we also hope that he has begun to heal from the horrors endured in Dona Ana County, New Mexico.

 

 

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Anthony’s Survival

Anne — September 08, 2012 @ 3:20 PM — Comments (2)

NOTE: This is Part II of a three-part commentary on solitary confinement. Part I is here.

Anthony Graves has a story to tell.

But Anthony’s story is no fictional, pretty-boy, imaginative weave of rainbows, sunshine, ice cream Sundays and trips to the beach. There are no velvety beginnings or wonderfully orchestrated endings in Graves’ story. Trumpets blare no angelic melodies and cumulus clouds don’t reveal artistic make-believes only a child of innocence can appreciate.

Anthony Graves’ story is a story about hell. And madness. And slow descents into the madness of hell. And how one, if not careful, can and will plunge into pits of that abyss, never to surface again. There is no phoenix-rising in hell.

Most importantly, however, Anthony Graves’ story is also one about triumph and survival and how a man, who spent more than 18 years in a Texas prison for a crime he did not commit, emerged from the depths of a place where no man or woman, guilty or innocent, wishes to live. In Anthony Graves’ life of hell on earth, “survival of the fittest” took on a new and urgent bearing.

For a solid decade of Graves’ nearly twenty years behind bars, a small, dank holding cell—a cemented space known as solitary confinement—was his home. While the adage, “a man’s home is his castle” can be applicable to those in the free world, Anthony Graves’ “home” warranted no such acclaim. For Anthony, “home” was a cruel, dark and disconcerting place of ill repute. At times, his diminutive, unadorned space seemed to suppress his breath and steal his will to live. But live, he did. And strong, he became. While life and strength can, depending upon one’s essential makeup, become juxtaposed agents in one’s basic desire to overcome the most sinister circumstances, it takes a strong constitution to emerge psychologically sound and not diminished by the memories of dark days and even darker nights.

In a first-ever United States Senate hearing on solitary confinement on June 19, 2012, Anthony Graves, who was released from prison in 2010, became part of the discourse, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

In his address to the Senate Subcommittee on the horrors and hell of the psychologically-damaging—but legal—practice of segregating prisoners within prisons, Graves spoke truth to power. The primary speaker at the Senate Subcommittee hearing, UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Dr. Craig Haney, the nation’s leading expert on inmate mental health, presented riveting testimony on the customary tradition of housing prison inmates in separate housing units within the institution. Solitary confinement, Haney testified, “precipitates a descent into madness.” And while Haney’s testimony was academically, theoretically and statistically insightful, it was Anthony Graves’ personal account of solitary confinement in a Texas prison that literally put a face with the practice of legalized inmate separatism.

While Graves sought no celebrity spotlight in bringing attention to the subject, it took a strong personal commitment to testify about the psychological currents he fought and the external battles he witnessed on a continuous basis and not succumb to the emotional and physical effects of solitary confinement.

He was a powerful presence at the hearing, and he pulled no punches during his very candid testimony.

In eloquently articulating the long-term mental and psychological effects of the legalized practice, Graves recounted how fellow inmates would slowly descend into a psychotic “madness” becoming, as Haney testified, a shadowy fraction of their former selves. A great majority of men who had been relegated to solitary confinement, according to Graves, engaged in aberrant behaviors that were not only mentally erosive, but physically damaging as well, including the practice of self-mutilation and other forms of physical torture. His testimony included the revelation of an inmate who gouged his (the inmates’) eyes and fellow inmates who engaged in equally disturbing physical performances.

Piercing screams, a constant auditory presence in such conditions, were commonplace and could be heard emanating from all corners of the units—at all times of the day and night—as inmates began to slowly lose control of their mental faculties. Fellow inmates, attempting mightily to cope with their own demons became, according to Graves, immune to the verbal onslaughts. Call and response chants had no rhythms, no reasons and no rhymes. Solitary minutes extended into hours, which evolved into days, which expanded into months, which, for many prisoners, stretched into a never-ending land of lost souls amid a restricted, chaotic landscape. Prisoners in solitary confinement, confessed Graves, become dehumanized, desensitized and emotionally bankrupt.

While there exists, Graves noted, a need to separate dangerous prisoners from the general population because of safety issues and concerns, the conditions present in solitary confinement units must be addressed and improvements made beyond the proverbial rhetoric of “prison reform.”  Policies, procedures, rules and regulations governing solitary confinement must be implemented through the courts for any changes within individual institutions to be effective and result in any long-term changes. The great majority of inmates in solitary confinement perceive their lives as worthless and their situations dire and hopeless. Nothing good, he testified, comes out of the practice: It is a place no one wishes their most arch enemy to be housed. Not for a minute. Not for a day. Not for a month. And certainly not for a lifetime.

When one is separated from human contact for extended periods of time and denied opportunities to mingle with other prisoners, Graves maintained, the administrative practice serves no social or redemptive purposes, and prisoners can—and very often do—resort to animalistic behaviors and can, just as quickly, begin to feel a psychological and mental violation deeper and more significant than the crime for which they have been accused. For Graves, who maintained his innocence for the duration of his time in prison, his placement in solitary confinement was all the more daunting and repulsive. In such conditions, Graves testified,  there is no room for compromise or any promise of a positive outcome, especially when innocent (as he was found to be) of the crime for which one has been accused, convicted and subsequently incarcerated.

Although his testimony on the perils of solitary confinement revealed a legal custom so horrific—and its practice so brutal—that it left members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee stunned, his testimony ended on a note of positivity, optimism and change.

While the memories of his ordeal in the Texas prison system still form a harrowing reminiscence of monumental proportions, which he must confront on a daily basis, he hopes that his Houston-based charitable foundation, “Anthony Believes” can begin a stream of hope, healing and redemption for those who have experienced the horrors of solitary confinement and are looking for a way to move forward in their lives. His voice is one worth listening to, and his story is a narrative worth repeating.

“Reasessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and Public Safety Consequences” can be accessed at: http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm

 

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Solitary Confinement: Re-assessing, Re-evaluating, Re-thinking

Anne — July 27, 2012 @ 4:27 PM — Comments (1)

Note: This is the first of a three-part series on solitary confinement.

Dr. Craig Haney, the nation’s leading expert on inmate mental health, and a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, recently testified before a U. S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights on the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners. Inmates in long-term confinement, according to Haney, suffer mental breakdowns from the lack of human contact that can lead to a multitude of mental, physical and emotional conditions, including psychosis, mutilations and suicide. Solitary confinement for most inmates, Haney testified, “precipitates a descent into madness” and can cause “profound, psychological damage.”

The increase in solitary confinement in the United States (since the late 1970s), according to statistics provided by Haney, is the result of the “confluence of three unfortunate trends”: mass imprisonment, the shift in responsibility for housing the mentally ill to the nation’s prison systems, and the abandonment of the notion of rehabilitation. Haney, who is also chair of UCSC’s Legal Studies program, estimated that 80,000 of the nation’s 2.3 million inmates in prisons and jails are in long-term solitary confinement. A great number of inmates have spent the majority of their prison sentences in solitary confinement, a legal and administrative practice that separates designated inmates from the prison’s general population.

Professor Haney was invited to testify by Subcommittee chairman Senator Richard “Dick” Durbin, D-Ill, at the first-ever hearing on the constitutional, fiscal, and public safety consequences of solitary confinement. Since 1971, Haney has conducted groundbreaking research into the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners. His work has been cited in numerous scholarly journals and publications. Since 1971, he has been a leading proponent of mental health issues affecting prison inmates.  As a graduate student, he was one of the principal investigators in an academic undertaking that became known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE).” He and fellow researchers placed a group of psychologically healthy college students in a prison-like environment, randomly assigning half to the position of prison guards; the other participants were designated as prisoners.

The researchers in the SPE carefully monitored participants’ behavior during the designated period, eventually ending the experiment, however, upon their observation that the otherwise “psychologically healthy volunteers in the simulated prison [setting] rapidly deteriorated into mistreatment and emotional breakdowns.” Thus began Haney’s prolific research into the effects of solitary confinement upon prisoners who have been incarcerated for extended periods of time. Since the SPE, Haney’s work has extended into the effects of capital punishment as well. In 2011, his research was cited numerous times in the majority opinion when the United States Supreme Court upheld a ruling ordering California to release 46,000 prisoners in an effort to relieve the state’s overcrowded prisons.

While a great portion of Haney’s testimony before the Subcommittee centered upon the effects of solitary confinement, he also addressed the state of  prisons’ mental health workers, individuals who are assigned the task of treating inmates who have mental health issues.  Oftentimes the workers are (themselves) stressed and too overburdened to render effective care with respect to noticeable improvements in inmates’ mental health issues. Such inadequate  healthcare not only harms prisoners, Haney testified, it also “endangers the public once those prisoners are released” from prison. Without adequate mental healthcare as well as available, external counseling, prisoners, once released from the confines of a structured environment, are oftentimes present and “untreated” in the public domain.

Many times, according to statistics  provided during the hearing, non-treated inmates (or inadequately treated inmates) commit crimes which cause their return to the familiar, institutional environment of incarceration. A vicious cycle of re-institutionalization becomes, in many cases, the norm. An overburdened healthcare system speaks not only to an inadequate system of governance–as it relates to prison reformation–it also articulates a much broader statement in terms of the responsibilities of government in being fiscally accountable to those who work in conditions as presented in California’s (and other states’) prison facilities.

Haney’s testimony before the Subcommittee concluded on multiple points of note. According to Haney, we put “far too many people in prison, we pay far too little attention to what happens to them while they’re there, we keep them there for far too long, then we disregard what happens to them when they try to make the difficult transition to come out into the free world.” In April 2012,the National Academy of Sciences appointed Haney to a panel to study the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the United States.

Others testifying on issues related to solitary confinement included the Honorable Charles Samuels, Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons; Christopher Epps, Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections; and former inmate Anthony Graves, who was released from Texas death row in 2010, after spending 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Ten of the 18 years Graves spent on death row were in solitary confinement. He is the founder of “Anthony Believes,” an organization dedicated to the health and well-being of individuals consigned to death row and solitary confinement. His front-line advocacy has garnered national attention on issues related to solitary confinement and prison reformation.

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