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Sleep

3/22/2015

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The sound echoed around the block, crashing against concrete walls with the force of each angry blow. A few guys called out. “Hey man, why the noise?” I say the blows were angry, but there’s no other way to describe somebody mule-kicking a steel door with everything they have. All of the frenzied emotion generated within a 7’x9’ cell is channeled onto the surface of a door that refuses to open. Again and again and again.

It was 2:00 a.m.

The kicking stopped before the guards made it on the block and found out who was responsible. In the wake of the noise squeaky boots and keys punctuated queries of “who’s kicking their door?” When no one answered they left.

After a few minutes a new sound ricocheted off the walls.  Higher in pitch and frequency, it was easy to distinguish a bar of soap being slammed into the side of a commode like some demented alarm clock. BANG! BANG! BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG! It went on for a merciless minute. Then three. Guys started yelling. “Quit, man. Come on, stop!” Finally, the guards came. The banging stopped.

They walked around to each cell looking in and promising a reward. “Come on, fellas, tell us who it is. We’ll give you an extra breakfast tray. Tell us who it is and we’ll stick him in the drunk tank, naked.” Nobody spoke up, though we salivated over the temptation of an extra breakfast tray. Two eggs rather than one. An extra shot of orange juice. A few more spoonfuls of grits. And sleep. Silence between annoyed keys and squeaky boots. After a while they left.

“Hey. J-Will. What’s up man? Why you dragging us?” It was as much a plea to stop as any I’ve heard. Everyone was awake now, and very angry.

In prison, night’s hour glass has extra holes in it. When sleep comes, gone are the plodding daylight hours, confining walls, and thoughts of letters. Sleep is relief for most of us, the only end to suffering we’re ever likely to come back from. With this blessed comfort come dreams of love, companionship, peace and life in all of its complexity. Desires so vivid and deep reality is a disheartening comparison. Sleep cannot be degraded, beaten or chained. In sleep lies our freedom.

When sleep eludes us the pain and isolation of imprisonment oppresses other thoughts. Then, the beast within takes over and you act out and do funny things. Crazy, irrational, maddening things such as imposing your suffering on others. Why should they have peace? Why should they get to escape when you’re in hell with those unrelenting demons fear and regret?

About ten minutes went by before J-Will kicked his door again. It seemed to have gotten louder somehow. As if the echo travelled farther, and that’s when I realized the emergency exit was open and three guards managed to sneak on the block without anyone taking notice. They carried a fire extinguisher that wasn’t anything of the sort. It was mace. Industrial strength, riot-sized, choke-you-to-death mace. They keyed open the food slot on J-Will’s door, thrust the long nozzle through, and sprayed him like some troublesome cockroach.

J-Will screamed.

Two of the guards laughed and walked off as the other watched his victim writhe on the floor, choking, coughing, and crying. The two guards returned with a black device known simply as “The Chair”. Black and boxy, The Chair is a restraint device used to punish problematic inmates. The guards sat it in the middle of the dayroom over a drain in the floor, dragged J-Will from his cell and cut off his jumpsuit with a pair of scissors.

He was a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most. No hair on his face or chest. So skinny I could count each rib from twenty feet away. Cheeks sunken and pocked with acne, skin stretched taut around small bones. Just a kid a few years younger than me.

One of the guards handcuffed J-Will behind the back and jerked him upright by the wrists, eliciting a cry of pain. They forced him into the chair and strapped in his ankles, hips and chest. “Please,” he begged. The guards ignored him as a rubber mouth piece was shoved between his teeth and what looked like a football helmet with a visor and earmuffs strapped to his head. Then they left.

The Chair is designed to recline its occupant at such an angle that one’s weight is entirely on the cuffed wrists. The legs are up high so unless you’re really tall your feet don’t touch the ground. It’s agony in the way a pillory was intended to be embarrassing and the iron maiden final and gruesome. The helmet immersed you in your suffering, shutting off sight and sound. J-Will would have to stay that way for four hours.

“Damn,” said an old man. “They got that young boy hemmed up.” It was quiet except for J-Will’s muffled moans. Laying on my bunk, wide awake in this nightmare, I wondered if sleep would ever come. The walls glowed with reflected fluorescent light, ridiculing notions of freedom in the night. I knew then that dreams are delusions, the only defense we have against anguish. As I began to drift images of The Chair skittered through my skull and when sleep arrived it was dreamless.

“I am tired of tears and laughter,

And men that laugh and weep;

Of what may come hereafter

For men that sow and reap;

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers,

Desires and dreams and powers

And everything but sleep.”

--Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine”

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Deinstitutionalization

3/12/2015

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America is sick. Like a cancer that metastasizes and corrupts other parts of the body, deinstitutionalization allows the mentally ill to go untreated, undiagnosed, and unwatched in order to cut corners on budgets. The money saved is then typically funneled into building more prisons and bulking up police forces. It’s akin to giving aspirin to a patient dying of leukemia. Legislators around the country have been aware of the trend to imprison the mentally ill since the 70s, but it is only now that the prison industrial complex has absorbed millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has begun to worry.

In the US, if you are severely mentally ill – meaning you have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, autism, schizoaffective disorder, or are mentally retarded – the likelihood you will go to prison is 8 times greater than your chances of receiving help at a hospital through voluntary or involuntary commitment.

To give you a better idea of exactly how many people deinstitutionalization affects, here are some numbers . . .

·         It is estimated 1 in 17 Americans suffer from severe mental illness (about 20 million)

·         As of 2012 the American Psychiatric Association found that nearly 360,000 incarcerated individuals suffer from a serious mental illness

·         In 1955 there were 340 public psychiatric beds per 100,000 people. In 2015 there were 17 public psychiatric beds per 100,000 people—a 95% reduction.

In case the impact of these statistics is too difficult for you to understand, allow me to clarify. It’s not that 360,000 people made a conscious decision to engage in criminal activities such as robbery, rape, murder, and arson. This number reflects how the mentally ill being denied beds in psychiatric units are struggling to survive in society. It’s apparent at least 360,000 people are not receiving adequate care from mental health professionals and outpatient treatment centers. This is a system-wide failure not specific to any single state, but deeply impacting each and every one.

Deinstitutionalization is a process that refers to the transfer of mentally ill patients from institutional settings to outpatient, community-based facilities that emphasize a “hands off” approach to treatment while administering high doses of psychotropic medications. In theory, the practice was meant to reduce a reliance upon public hospitals to hold the mentally ill and prompt communities to take an active role in their re-entry instead. In some cases it works, but not for the severely mentally ill.

Considering that reintegration into a community is extremely difficult for sane ex-cons, it’s nearly impossible for insane ones who struggle with simple tasks. Over time, the theory of outpatient care has degraded the number of mentally ill – 20 million nationwide – has increased. Severely mentally ill may be given a prescription of medication to calm the symptoms of their disorder, an appointment with a psychologist and/or psychiatrist, and the responsibility to engage in outpatient care, but that’s exactly the problem. A person who is severely mentally ill is irresponsible. Simple tasks such as finding a job, paying bills, maintaining a place to live, and all of the things associated with a normal lifestyle are very hard to do.

As a result of understaffed outpatient care centers and the numerous problems facing the severely mentally ill, stress builds and activates some of the more debilitating and dangerous symptoms of a disorder. In many cases the individual winds up homeless, but an alarming number commit crimes. Sometimes the crime is minor, creating an in and out pattern of incarceration, and other times the crime is significant enough to warrant a lengthy prison term that leaves the victims asking how this could be allowed to happen.

Public hospitals and asylums are so select in who gets one of their limited beds it can be easier to gain acceptance at an Ivy League school with droves of qualified people waiting to get in. Instead, the mentally ill aggregate in prison where their disorder has been criminalized because there aren’t enough hospitals to hold them. In prison they receive little or no care, often winding up in solitary confinement where their illness is exacerbated by the torture inherent in long periods of isolation and sensory deprivation. For years at a time. If the severely mentally ill person is not beaten or starved to death (see “State locks down info on inmate death” at jneff@newsobserver.com; or look for aarticles about Timothy E. Helms and Alexander Correctional Facility for examples in N.C.) they are released back into the community even worse than before.

The next time you turn and see some homeless guy raving on the sidewalk, read about the horrors of a mass shooting (the Aurora, Virginia Tech, and Newtown shooters all had extensive mental health histories), or ignore the mistreatment and abuse of recalcitrant inmates on lock-up maybe you’ll think of the word deinstitutionalization. Maybe then, when you’re relaxing in a park where the Dorothea Dix hospital used to be, you will understand these are symptoms of a greater disease.

For more information the News & Observer has a number of articles related to this topic, or you can go to:

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf

TACReports.org/treatment-behind-bars

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Jimmy

3/12/2015

 
In the woods around my childhood home there was an abundance of creatures and other insects. Of course they didn’t stay in that area and could often be found in the yard, garage, house (mom fought a near constant battle against spiders) and all through the air. Mosquitoes, dragonflies, beetles of every sort, crickets, grasshoppers, centipedes, salamanders, toads and on and on. There were so many creepy, crawly things you couldn’t count the different species. I loved it!

During the summer and spring this tiny, vast population made itself known to me and I in turn made myself known to it. Whether it was to turn over logs to find salamanders and toads to play with, spiders to tease my sisters (the harmless daddy longlegs), or chase other insects unfortunate enough to annoy, sting, or cross my path – I did as boys do. Now that I’m an adult those smaller, lesser creatures remind me of a power dynamic I’ve seen replayed in prison.

Jimmy is mentally handicapped. When I met him sixteen years ago it was obvious there was something “off” about his behavior, but over time his mind has deteriorated and become twisted with delusions of grandeur – he taught James Brown how to dance – and persecution – everybody hates him and the mailroom is throwing away his record company contracts. He rarely sleeps, or if he does it’s done sitting up at a table while watching the Young and the Restless or the Steve Harvey Show.

Too agreeable and overly friendly, Jimmy speaks to anybody unfortunate enough to make eye contact with him, telling story after story like a child who has to say as much as he possibly can before his father walks away. He talks in a “look at me, hey watch this!” fashion even if nobody is listening. Though Jimmy is 60 he capers, cavorts, sings, dances and waves as if on stage or beneath the big top, never really still except in those moments his body reminds him of the years.

Jimmy does not belong in prison no matter what he has been convicted of – a hospital would better suit his inability to function in a normal social setting. This is the case for many who are in prison, but that’s neither here nor there.

Jimmy is a generally likeable person if you can get beyond his more annoying qualities. For some, however, his behavior is intolerable. They believe he has control over his actions and, as a result, feel his “foolishness” is intentional. Jimmy has been beaten for not understanding. One time he was hit in the face with a mop wringer for accidentally exposing himself to a Muslim. Another time he was strangled for changing to a soap opera in the midst of a movie. Slapped, shouted and cursed at, degraded, and disrespected by many people Jimmy is oppressed by the rest of the prison population because he’s incapable of retaliating in any significant way. Much like an insect who buzzes a little too loudly, the man is frequently squashed.

I understand how Jimmy’s antics can be bothersome to other prisoners, but at the same time I can think of a host of behaviors by normal, intelligent people that are much worse. People who are of sound mind and body, at least enough to know when better social etiquette is needed, or required.

This is prison, you say. Better cannot be expected, you think. It’s bigger than that. The feeling of superiority, that sense of being better, smarter, holier, bigger, more well-endowed, and more lawful than another person can be summed up as a problem with taking another’s perspective. In the prison environment most people don’t care and this is why men like Jimmy have the hardest time. Because the community didn’t care enough to treat his mental illness before he committed a crime, and the prison doesn’t care enough to protect those people when they arrive.

I wonder how many times in our conversations we step on beetles? Jimmy helps me to remember that even when we see ourselves better than another person for any reason it may simply be I’ve yet to look up and see the boot hovering overhead.

    Author

    In the time he has been incarcerated, Lyle May has earned an Associates in Arts degree with a social science emphasis through Ohio University; paralegal certification through the Center for Legal Studies; and is currently working on his bachelor’s degree. He has published two articles in The Wing, an international newsletter for death penalty opponents, and is hard at work writing a second memoir detailing his experiences on death row. When he is not writing Lyle enjoys sci-fi and fantasy novels, calisthenics, and dreams of freedom.

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    Lyle welcomes comments to his blog.  However, because Lyle's case is still pending, he will not be able to respond to any questions or comments that you may have.

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