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The Madness of American Incarceration
by Christine Montross
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No matter how a person has come to be imprisoned, however, everyone behind bars is treated the same. Correctional facilities in our country operate under the absolute—if erroneous—belief that all who are incarcerated have done wrong and that those who have done wrong deserve punishment.
And so the second part of this book is an honest examination of how we treat people in prison: how our approach affects them and how it affects us. The outcome is not what we have intended.
I once toured Manson Youth Institution, a high-security prison in Connecticut for fourteen- to twenty-year-old boys. On the tour I was led through one of the prison housing units, which, despite looking like typical cellblocks, are euphemistically referred to as "cottages."
As we walked through the hallways, we passed one cell in which a boy was alone, standing on his toilet, neck craned, stretching his face toward the ceiling and talking out loud at full speed. I said nothing, assuming that the boy was mentally ill. After all, I frequently see actively hallucinating patients who are in conversation with visions that no one else can see or voices that no one else can hear. "Responding to internal stimuli" is the notation I make in the chart to record that my patient remains tethered to these perceptual abnormalities of psychosis.
Down the hallway we then passed another boy in another cell in the exact same position, doing the exact same thing, at which point I knew that the conclusion I had come to was wrong. Though I've seen an incalculable number of patients in the throes of psychosis, I have never seen the symptoms of mental illness manifest themselves identically in different people.
"Why are they standing on their toilets?" I asked the CO.
"It's a big problem," he said. "They figured out that they can talk to each other through the vents. It's loud in here, and also they get in trouble if they're shouting out their cell doors, so that's the only way they've got to talk to each other. They climb on their toilets to get up near the vents, and then they have whole conversations that way."
More than any other scenario that I've encountered in my career as a psychiatrist, this moment has stood out for me as incontrovertible evidence of the fundamental need for connection within us all. These boys on their toilets embodied the lengths of discomfort and risk and innovation that human beings will go to in order to reach out to another. To hear from another. To be heard by another. To wait for an echo. These are children in a critical period of neurodevelopment, in extraordinary circumstances, trying desperately not to go through it all alone.
It is disingenuous for us to imagine that the harsh environments in which we house imprisoned men, women, and children do not damage them. And it is unwise f or us to ignore that damaging our imprisoned citizens undermines our communities more broadly.
Ninety-five percent of all inmates in America are eventually released from prison and return to our communities. Yet we willfully ignore the ramifications of releasing people into our neighborhoods directly from correctional environments that are designed for maximum punishment and control. Some people are released directly from solitary confinement to the streets. Some from years spent in solitary to the streets.
Five Mualimm-Ak is a prison activist who served nearly twelve years on weapons possession charges. Five of those years were spent in solitary confinement in New York State. Since his release he has worked with numerous human rights organizations, including the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow and the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, to protest the continued use of isolation in our nation's prisons.
"I was in Upstate, a supermax prison way up by the Canadian border," Mualimm-Ak writes of the day of his release. "I was in solitary confinement when a guard came to my cell one morning and said, 'No breakfast today. You're getting out.' I was handcuffed and searched, and then brought to the gate, where I was uncuffed, asked to sign a paper, and given a bag of my property and $40. Then I was outside, by myself. It was 7:00 a.m. I just stood there for a long time until a van came to take me to the bus station. It was like a dream. They gave me a ticket and I climbed onto the bus, and I was so overwhelmed that I slept for nine hours. When I woke up I was in the [New York City] Port Authority Bus Terminal, which has to be one of the most crowded, crazy places in the world. I remember folding up right there in the bus station. I didn't know it at the time, but I was having my first panic attack. I was sweating, and I could feel my heart beating in my chest and my eyes darting back and forth. I just slid down to the floor in a corner."
From Waiting for an Echo by Christine Montross, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Christine Montross.
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