Where’s the Outrage?

Many mentally-ill prisoners live in such horrible prison conditions that a Hartsville judge this month gave the state Department of Corrections six months to clean up its act.
Did you hear about this story from two weeks ago? While the 45-page order by S.C. Circuit Judge Michael Baxley spawned a smattering of news coverage, it’s gotten such soft treatment around the Statehouse that some key legislators are sending a letter around to let lawmakers know more.
“The evidence is overwhelming that SCDC (South Carolina Department of Corrections) has known for over a decade that its system exposes seriously mentally ill inmates to substantial risk of serious harm,” Baxley wrote in his order on the 8-year-old case.
In 2002, lawyers at Nelson Mullins started looking into conditions involving mentally-ill prisoners in state custody. They discovered how the department put unruly prisoners with mental health issues in solitary confinement for months and years. They found how prisoners would lie in their own excrement or blood. Videos on a Web site set up by the team show things so gruesome that you might have nightmares.
An estimated one in six state prisoners have mental health issues. So when they shout, scream, hurt themselves or hurt others, good things do not happen. And that’s why Andrews and the pro bono Nelson Mullins team filed a class-action suit against the department in 2005.
“Our 3,500 clients with serious mental illnesses feel like they’re constantly in a deep, dark tunnel with no relief in sight,” Andrews said this week. “They have a hard time finding anyone who will listen to them, help them understand their problem, manage their disease and receive helpful medicine that will treat the disease and the side effects.”
When prisoners with an untreated mental illness acted out, which often happens because of the disease, they have been disciplined by force — put naked in shower stalls, recreation cages or holding cells. They were placed for days, weeks, months or even years in solitary confinement. Through the years, some died.
“It’s this [disciplinary] process that causes inmates with mental illness to be subject to gas, use of restraint chairs and solitary confinement at rates that are twice as great as inmates without mental illness,” Andrews said.
In short, it’s a modern-day horror movie to be mentally ill and in prison in South Carolina.
In The Atlantic Monthly’s provocative “When Good People Do Nothing: The Appalling Story of South Carolina’s Prisons,” Andrew Cohen wrote this month that what was happened in South Carolina prisons was immoral, “bordering on something profoundly cruel to be caught violating the rights of others in this fashion and then to show no regret or remorse for having done so.”
Knowing all this, where’s the outrage?
Answer: Almost nowhere to be seen. So few legislators seem to know about the whole case that state Sen. Mike Fair, the Greenville Republican who chairs the Senate Corrections and Penology Committee, and a couple of others sent a letter to all legislators Thursday outlining what was happening.
Fair, who didn’t come off looking too good in Cohen’s article, said Baxley’s order was already having effects, although the state is likely to appeal. Conversations are happening at top levels about the state’s treatment of mentally-ill prisoners. And, he said, the issue has become part of the legislative agenda, albeit quietly so far.
Fair also pointed out that state lawmakers budgeted $1 million more for mental health treatment in prisons last year.
Action is needed, not an appeal. This case doesn’t need to be the battered can kicked down the road to avoid doing anything. Also needed: more training for guards, more psychiatrists and psychologists, more case workers, better facilities and a better assessment tool to determine whether inmates need mental health treatment.
Don’t be surprised if it costs $10 million for infrastructure improvements and $10 million a year for more needed mental health professionals. But it’s got to be done. If we as a state don’t stop warehousing mentally-ill inmates and abusing them, how in the world can any of us go to any church with a clear conscience?
 
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.