Punishment, not treatment
Every observation that Wooding makes about how mentally ill people are treated in prison and jail versus in a place like Riverview has recently been affirmed by the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians and by national experts speaking in favor of LD 1611, a bill the Legislature is considering that would prohibit prison inmates who have “serious mental illness” from being put in solitary, which the bill also would limit to 45 days for all but the most dangerous prisoners.
Corrections admits that more than half the inmates in the Warren supermax are seriously mentally ill, and over 100 inmates had been held in its solitary confinement for longer than 45 days during a recent seven-month period. Seven prisoners had been in the supermax for over a year.
“If the goal of the Corrections system is to ensure public safety, then segregation is a counterproductive failure,” said Janis Petzel, president of the psychiatrists’ group, in a news release. Solitary creates and exacerbates mental illness and cripples social skills, she said. “Prisoners who have experienced segregation and who are released back into the community relapse back into criminal behavior sooner and more aggressively than their general prison population counterparts.”
Petzel described to the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee how several states stopped putting severely mentally ill prisoners in their supermaxes. Another benefit with less use of solitary confinement is that violence toward staff and other inmates declines, she and others testified.
At a State House news conference, Petzel and two other Maine physicians pointed to a nearby alternative to supermax-type confinement — across the Kennebec River at Riverview. After the news conference, Maine Public Radio’s Susan Sharon interviewed William Nelson, Riverview’s clinical director. He told her that isolation there lasts “in the range of an hour or two.” Physical restraints are used for only minutes. Mental hospitals abandoned harsh control methods years ago under pressure similar to that which is now being brought to bear on prison officials.
When the 13-member Criminal Justice Committee voted on LD 1611, its sponsor, Representative James Schatz, a Blue Hill Democrat, and Senator John Nutting, a Leeds Democrat, supported an amended bill that eliminated proposed restrictions on the use of restraints, a provision prison guards had especially objected to. Four legislators supported a “resolve” urging the department to look into some issues brought up by the bill; its language had not been worked out by press time. Seven members, heeding the protests of Corrections, voted “ought not to pass.”
Several of this latter group were ex-police officers and never deviated from supporting the department and tough treatment of all prisoners — and rejecting the use of the word “torture” to describe solitary confinement. In the public debate the Maine Civil Liberties Union, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, doctors, and others have repeatedly called solitary confinement torture, reflecting the increasing medical and legal consensus.
The bill and resolve will soon go to the House and Senate floors. Several leaders of the Democratic majority are bill cosponsors, but the committee’s three-way split makes the outcome hard to predict, and Democratic Governor John Baldacci is opposed.
Lance Tapley can be reached at lance.tapley@gmail.com.
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