Transcription
BOP Hypocrisy
By Jeremy Pinson
Today the Director of the Bureau of Prisons issued a memo encouraging inmates to be strong, seek help, and don't commit suicide. I can't help but be nauseous at his hypocrisy. It wasn't until he was call to testify before the Senate Judicial Committee that he became at all concerned about inmates' feelings.
Each year dozens sat in despair wailing, amputating appendages, mutilating bodies and most tragically committing suicide. Not rarely but literally by the dozens. Almost universally, they were housed in segregation by callous and indifferent staff who equated mental illness to a chosen form of aberrant behavior and refused to acknowledge what the Supreme Court acknowledged in 1890: that solitary confinement is destructive to the mind, body and spirit. Hell, even John McCain who once had his own taste of solitary confinement described it aptly as, "It's hell."
I've been in it for eight of nine years, and my mind can never erase the horrors I've seen nor undo the damage it has done to me. The director and his memo stinks of hypocrisy. I live in American's most famous torture center; I know what it does to men because I have seen it and I have felt it. Just today, the warden issued a memo to his officers. His chief concern? Suicide rates? Inmates' mental health? Connections to loved ones? Nope. Dust.
I wish I had a dollar for every memo issued by hypocrites in BOP. I'd be rich.
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Replies (1)
I've read a few articles lately on Solitary confinement; it seems to be a topic of discussion right now, as it should be. One article published in the New York Times in late August by a Psychiatrist speaking about the effects of over use of solitary confinement in the U.S.A. These were a couple of passages from that article:
"...depriving people of freedom may be justifiable. But prolonged isolation inflicts another kind of harm, one that can never be justified. This harm is ontological; it violates the very structure of our relational being...For the sake of justice, not only for them but for ourselves, we must put an end to the over-use of solitary confinement in this country, and we must begin the difficult but mutually rewarding work of bringing the tens of thousands of currently isolated prisoners back into the world". They were quotes from Lisa Guenther. Associate Professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the author of "Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement."
This article began..."There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged. They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this cluster of symptoms SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units of many supermax prisons."
It is shocking to think something so preventable, with characteristics so specific we can call it a 'syndrome' exists. It is nothing less than a crime to subject a fellow human being to such conditions that can affect the demise of, an otherwise healthy, person's mental health. I am glad to see from reading your blogs that you keep your mind active Jeremy, as that seems to be your only defense.