Mental health crisis behind bars
“Either you are going to spend more or you are going to have to release a lot of inmates.”
— Alabama Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster
One of those choices is difficult but doable. The other is unthinkable. Doing nothing, as of this week, is not an option. |
It shouldn’t have been one anyway.
Alabama has run afoul of federal law and federal officials before with regard to its grossly overpopulated and underfunded corrections system. Now it has done so again, this time specifically in reference to inmates with mental problems.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled Tuesday in favor of inmates who sued the Alabama Department of Corrections three years ago over treatment and conditions they claimed were contributing to violence and suicides among those with psychiatric disorders. (One of the inmates who testified in that case — who has since hanged himself — described a prison officer offering him a razor with which to take his own life.)
In a sweeping order that ran more than 300 pages, Thompson described the state’s psychiatric care of its corrections population as “horrendously inadequate” to such a degree that it violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
“The skyrocketing suicide rate within ADOC in the last two years,” Thompson wrote, “is a testament to the concrete harm that inadequate mental health care has already inflicted on mentally ill prisoners.”
As has been well documented, Alabama’s prisons pack in twice the number of inmates they were built to house. Combine that with a shortage of both regular correctional officers and mental health staffers and the danger, to inmates and prison staff alike, is all too obvious.
Ward has been among a group of state lawmakers trying for years, unsuccessfully, to get the legislature to fund new prisons to alleviate the dangerous crowding: “We are going to have to increase capacity and we are going to have to provide more mental health services to comply with this order,” Ward said Wednesday.
As reported by Associated Press, the judge’s order did not lay out specific procedures for the state, but made it clear that the conditions the order described must be changed.
“The first thing we’ve got to do,” said Gov. Kay Ivey, “is get with our attorneys. It’s a lengthy order, contains a lot of information.” The governor also noted, AP reports, that while any remedies must meet with court approval, the state needs to formulate its own reform plan.
Which, hardly for the first time, raises the obvious question of why such chronically atrocious conditions required the intervention of a federal court to get the state to address them. Reform of such hellholes isn’t about “coddling criminals.” It’s about operating a prison system that for especially vulnerable inmates doesn’t prove to be a death sentence to which no court sentenced them and which their crimes didn’t earn them.
This story was originally published June 29, 2017 at 5:38 PM with the headline "Mental health crisis behind bars."