“Zookeepers Are Not Allowed to Keep Animals Like This”

“Zookeepers Are Not Allowed to Keep Animals Like This”
(April 10, 2014) The Treatment Advocacy Center reported on Tuesday that our jails and prisons have become the de facto mental institutions for people with mental illness, many of whom are kept in solitary confinement once they arrive there.

"Zookeepers are not allowed to keep zoo animals in the kind of housing that we put human beings in," said Dr. James Gilligan, clinical professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at New York University, about the use of solitary confinement as punishment for mentally ill inmates (“Are we torturing the mentally ill?,” The Huffington Post, April 4).

Solitary confinement is often used as a punishment of behaviors that are symptomatic of severe mental illness.

In fact, an estimated one-third to one-half of inmates in isolation “have some form of mental illness” and the isolation makes it exceedingly difficult for mental health practitioners in the jails to treat patients. Most often, the care they receive is minimal- medication and a brief check-in through the door with a clinician.

But “solitary is a crucial tool that helps guards maintain order and provide a safe environment in often overcrowded facilities,” corrections officers argue.

Placing someone who is mentally ill in solitary confinement perpetuates the problem- the more time someone with mental illness spends in solitary, the less time they spend receiving appropriate psychiatric treatment.  The more time someone remains in solitary confinement without appropriate treatment, the more likely they are to behave in a way that reinforces the decision to leave them there.

In our study on the treatment of inmates with mental illness in jails and prisons, we found there are now 10 times more individuals with serious mental illness in jails and prisons than in the nation’s remaining state hospitals. This makes the issue of how they receive treatment even more dire.