Cell Rooms: Cell Blocks In Psychiatric Prisons

This paper explores the topic of mental health within prisons and how it affects the inmates. The report of my findings were through research of twelve articles, two credible website sources, and a published textbook.

Everyday correctional officials work to deal with mental health inmates. Often hotly debated, many search for ways to work with this growing population. Glaze and Bonczar (2009) estimate around 2.3 million people are incarcerated within the US and of those, 20 percent suffer from some form of mental disorder. Even with such a high number, the rate of mental illnesses within the prison system is on the climb. Many of these inmates will remain incarcerated and receive little to no treatment for their mental issues. This essay, will look at the practices associated when dealing with mental illness and discuss the strategies on dealing with this growing issue.

Around the 1970’s and 1980’s around the United States many mental hospitals were shut down. There were many reasons why they closed these Asylums was because money, and knowing that there was only about twenty county asylums were built around the country. The asylums also known as the Looney bin was established in Britain after passing in 1808 county asylum act. There were so many patients in these asylums around the world in 1955 about 558,239 severely mentally ill people in the United States were accounted for. Now in these times any mentally ill people don’t get help they just go straight to jail without proper diagnosis or treatment. People need to know these people need extreme care and treatment. Even regular people or considered the norm in today’s society eventually go crazy when they’re in prison too long. We have as much people that are mentally ill as regularly incarcerated. There is one prison in Houston Texas that does take care there mentally ill. We have about 2.2 million

One evidence based practice technique that I have seen utilize in my healthcare setting is the use of locked doors on the psychiatric unit. All the doors are kept locked and you have to access them with a key to unlocked them. All visitors have to go through a lobby and check in and then have access to the unit by a healthcare staff member. Having a locked unit ensures the patient are kept safe. According to the article, Psychiatric care behind locked doors, locked doors are used to regulate patients and any other people to have access on and off the unit. This helps protects the community from the patients and protect the patients from the community. This is a major safety issue. If anyone access to the unit they could bring the patient things

Solitary Confinement has been used as a punishment, to keep the prisons secure. However, with the changing of opinions from a few decades ago, to present time, more people want less solitary confinement used. With also corrections policies changing over time has also changed the dynamic of how a younger person could be charged and sentenced, compared to an older person who is not a juvenile could be put into solitary confinement. More facts about the use of Solitary Confinement, the policy is up for debate. Starting with do I agree with the New York Times, The Living Death of Solitary Confinement?

New Life Prison is a private prison located in an unincorporated area of Brentwood, CA New Life prison is a dormitory setting and a minimum security prison for level one and two male inmate population of 500. New Life Prison is too focused on lowering the recidivism rate in CA. New Life prison is a new private prison and receives funding from grants and donations. New Life mission is to focus on the level one and two inmate’s within the state prison system. New Life mission is to help these individuals move on passed the crime they have committed and began to live their life again. In 2004 Folsom state prison was able to move their level one and two inmates to a minimum security facility (Department of Correction 2015). Most of these inmates

Throughout history crime has always presented itself as well as punishment for these crimes. In time there have been several ways to physically, emotionally, and psychologically punish a human being. However, being a part of the Guantanamo Bay era the increasing use of solitary confinement has offered itself to be one of the best ways to reprimand criminals as well as hostages. A troubling movement in the American prison system is the escalating use of sustained and consistent forms of cruel solitary confinement also known as supermax prisons which are used to confine prisoners that the government labels as dangerous. A documentary film, as well as several informative resources, will be used to uncover the truths behind this form of punishment.

A study conducted in California’s prison system from 1999 to 2004 determined that nearly half of all suicides committed by inmates were because they were in solitary confinement (Breslow, 2014). Although some inmates have failed at their suicide attempts, that does not mean that they have not attempted to end their lives. There is a higher rate of inmates self mutilating while being in solitary confinement than if they were in the general prison population (Breslow, 2014). This means that inmates that are isolated are more of a danger to themselves. Being in solitary confinement also attributes to personality disorders, Breslow mentioned that many inmates lose the ability to communicate with others after being in solitary confinement for a long period of time and thus do not want to leave their cells (2014). It can be argued that having inmates in solitary confinement is a human rights violation. When inmates are isolated, they are constantly being monitored through a camera. The inmates have no form of communication with people and even their food is passed through a slot on the door. Solitary confinement can be considered torture because it has been proven that by subjecting inmates to this they experience mental illnesses such as paranoia, hallucination, panic attacks, and suicidal attempts (Breslow, 2014).

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with over 2.4 million people in jail (American Friends Service Committee). A census taken in 2005 discovered that out of those 2.4 million prisoners behind bars, 81,622 of them were being held in solitary confinement (Casella and Ridgeway). In that same 2005 census, it was gathered that 44 states use solitary confinement in their prisons (Casella and Ridgeway). Eleven years later one can only image how these numbers have changed, and most likely grown. As defined by Solitary Watch, “Solitary confinement is the practice of isolating people in closed cells for 22-24 hours a day, virtually free of human contact, for periods of time ranging from days to decades.” Solitary confinement

Since the early 1800s, the United States has relied on a method of punishment barely known to any other country, solitary confinement (Cole). Despite this method once being thought of as the breakthrough in the prison system, history has proved differently. Solitary confinement was once used in a short period of time to fix a prisoners behavior, but is now used as a long term method that shows to prove absolutely nothing. Spending 22-24 hours a day in a small room containing practically nothing has proved to fix nothing in a person except further insanity. One cannot rid himself of insanity in a room that causes them to go insane. Solitary confinement is a flawed and unnecessary method of punishment that should be prohibited in the prison

Why is forced electroconvulsive therapry no longer acceptable but solitary confinement is? When will it become illegal? Why can’t prisoners be punished by having a meal or two withheld from them? The effects of solitary confinement are just as gruesome, if not more so, as those of forced electroconvulsive therapy. Its effects are not only psychological, but traverse even to the realm of physiology-the mind and body are equally subjected to the effects of solitary confinement. A comprehensive elucidation of the effects of solitary confinement will suffice in convincing the skeptic that it needs to be illegal and that an alternative method needs to be implemented. Since the physical effects of solitary confinement are relatively mild, the first and only “class” of effects that need to be delineated is undoubtedly the

Due to budget crises in states across the United States of America, state governments must cut funding to their punishment facilities causing overcrowding in prisons to increase every day. Overcrowded prisons pose a potential breeding ground for crime as hundreds of inmates are squeezed into small accommodations. Thousands of low-level offenders receive jail sentences each day, these criminals make up about a third of the inmates in the United States. In the words of Republican Governor Mitch Daniels of India, in the conservative National Review magazine, “We are imprisoning, in our most expensive spaces, more people for relatively minor, nonviolent offenses, like low-level property and drug violations. Some of our guests are not with the state corrections system long enough for any rehabilitation, substance-abuse counseling or job training to take place” (Katel). Evidently attention and change to this neglected criminal punishment system need to be addressed. This issue remains a troubling problem in our country, state governments offer the best possible solutions to prison overcrowding such as directing local officials to perform and improve prison construction, rethinking criminal law and responding to budgetary concerns.

“Both the book and the movie are insightful views into societal problems such as stereotypes about the people who have mental disorders. But the film is largely out of date in terms of depicting hospital staff as manipulative or evil. From what I saw when I worked in a similar institution, mental hospitals are a calm, healing environments—as they should be” (Wind Goodfriend, 2012).

Wallace Stegner once said, “Nothing in our history has bound us to a plot of ground [since] feudalism once bound Europeans” (Stegner 301). The only exception is being imprisoned. For those who brake society’s set laws, “Prisons and their many variants are built environments whose intended purpose is punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation” (Awofeso). Prisons began to be more widely used because the early Catholic Church disapproved of physical punishments. In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII authorized that incarceration and lack of liberty will take the place of the “eye for an eye” way of settling disputes previously employed (Awofeso). Today,

Isolation. The only thing felt in the cells of Macintosh state penitentiary. However it is in this isolation, where we find security. There are two types of people, in which call this place their home. The guilty, and non-guilty. Who am I kidding, everyone's guilty even if you didn't kill the man. The only difference is the guilty admit it. The guilty have accepted their fate, prepared to spend the rest of their lives in the strict confines of prison. The looks on your families and friends faces makes you guilty. What was once a, young happy boy, who couldn't hurt anything, is now a cold hearted killer. The nons, well they will forever be in limbo, never at peace.