Mental Health Memo
Westword
In what's being praised as a significant step toward reform, the
Colorado Department of Corrections is now instructing staff to no longer
consign mentally ill prisoners to administrative segregation. In a memo
to prison wardens issued earlier this week, a DOC official explains
that the "major mentally ill" must be sent to a residential treatment
program rather than being punished with ad-seg for misbehavior. That's a
sharp turnaround for the DOC, which has been criticized for using solitary confinement in recent years at a rate that's twice the national average.
"I am asking that, going forward, please ensure that your staff are
aware that offenders with MMI [major mental illness] Qualifiers cannot
be referred to Administrative Segregation placement," states interim
director of prisons Lou Archuleta in the memo.
Approximately 40 percent of the state's prisoners in ad-seg, or
23-hour-a-day isolation, are either developmentally disabled or have
received a diagnosis of serious mental illness. Some, like Troy Anderson and Sam Mandez,
have become the focal point of lawsuits and public attention because of
their many years of being buried in supermax confinement and lack of
treatment for chronic mental conditions.
DOC officials claim that they've greatly reduced the number of
prisoners housed in ad-seg over the last two years, an effort that began
under chief Tom Clements
before his murder last spring. The memo won't immediately change
anything for prisoners like Anderson and Mandez, but the ACLU of
Colorado, which obtained the memo on Thursday, hailed the move as "an
enormous step in the right direction." The organization has been pushing
the DOC to further restrict its use of ad-seg and beef up its
sputtering mental-health treatment resources.
"We remain concerned that the definition of major mental illness
adopted by CDOC is too narrow," ACLU staff attorney Rebecca Wallace
responded in a prepared statement, "and that there are still prisoners
in administrative segregation who are seriously mentally ill and should
not be placed in prolonged solitary confinement."
Read the full memo below.
1 comment:
DOC has long maintained that it cannot "find" people qualified and willing to treat the mentally ill. Lou, in particular, is a poor choice for prison director, as his attitude is that all prisoners are liars and that they fake things in order to change their circumstances. He should be replaced. mpc
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