Indiana Prison Conditions Lead to Suicide

Indiana Prison Conditions Lead to Suicide

ACLU: Indiana prison conditions lead to suicide, self-mutilation

By Ken Kusmer Associated Press Writer Indiana Star February 3, 2005

INDIANAPOLIS -- The isolation and other conditions found in one of the state's most restrictive prison units have led four mentally ill inmates to kill themselves and others to self-mutilation, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed in a federal lawsuit Thursday.

Conditions within the Secured Housing Unit of western Indiana's Wabash Valley Correctional Facility have caused prisoners to hallucinate, rip chunks of flesh from their bodies, rub human excrement on themselves and attempt suicide, sometimes with success, the ACLU charged.

The unit in Carlisle houses up to 288 prisoners in solitary, windowless cells, and one-half to two-thirds of them are mentally ill, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Terre Haute.

The complaint seeks a ban on the state placing mentally ill prisoners in the unit and class action status to represent all mentally ill prisoners assigned to the unit at the prison about 30 miles south of Terre Haute. It does not seek monetary damages.

"Locking up prisoners with mental illness in small, windowless cells is psychological torture," said Ken Falk, legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU's state affiliate. "Confinement for lengthy periods of time in 24-hour isolation would compromise even a healthy person's sanity."

The Indiana Department of Correction does not comment on pending litigation, spokesman Randy Koester said.

Conditions at the unit have attracted negative attention before. Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based human rights monitoring organization, issued a 1997 report condemning conditions there, saying, "In some cases the suffering that results is so great that the treatment must be condemned as torture."

Inmates are incarcerated in cells about 7 feet by 12 feet, each with a concrete bed and plastic mattress, a metal shelf, a fixed table and stool, and a combination sink and toilet. Many choose to remain locked in their cells 24 hours per day because they have no group recreation. Books, letters, photographs and other personal items are restricted.

The Department of Correction created the Secured Housing Unit to shock its most troublesome inmates into conforming, Falk said.

"The problem with that is, if you're mentally ill and not able to conform your behavior, you will never leave the SHU," Falk said.

Four mentally ill inmates in the unit have committed suicide since 2000, the lawsuit alleges. One hanged himself, another set himself on fire, a third cut his wrists and throat, and the fourth swallowed a cloth and choked to death.

David C. Fathi, an attorney with the ACLU's National Prison Project, said it has successfully challenged the incarceration of mentally ill inmates in so-called "supermax," or super maximum security, units in Wisconsin and Connecticut. The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to consider a case from Ohio in which the ACLU and another civil rights group challenged the denial to inmates of opportunities to prove they did not belong in that state's supermax.

"This is one area where the courts have really spoken with one voice: To put people with mental illness in these facilities is unconstitutional," Fathi said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

The case is the second in two weeks in which the ICLU has gone to federal court to force the Indiana prison system to alleviate what it considers oppressive inmate conditions.

A lawsuit filed Jan. 24 alleges the department subjected more than 400 inmates at the Pendleton Correctional Facility northeast of Indianapolis to conditions unfit for dogs. It said inmates were held two per cell for nearly five months during a lockdown last year in which they could leave the 12-by-8-foot spaces for only three shower periods a week.

Source: Indianapolis Star

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Last Updated on 02/06/05 webmaster@namiscc.org

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