Healthy people who are forced into solitary confinement in prison may develop mental illnesses due to their isolation, but the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) deliberately ignores the problem, according to a brief filed in federal court last week by the SPLC.
“Subjecting prisoners with mental illness to solitary confinement only makes their conditions worse, and it can even cause mental illness in previously healthy prisoners,” said Maria Morris, senior supervising attorney with the SPLC. “Alabama prisons should not be warehouses to hide away and abandon people who are struggling with mental illness. People in these situations go unnoticed and untreated, and too many take their own lives. Even after ADOC’s suicide rate shot up to one of the highest in the country, and ADOC recognized that solitary confinement was primarily what these suicides had in common, the state still did nothing to address the risks.”
The filing is the latest development in the SPLC’s ongoing litigation against ADOC for failing to provide adequate medical and mental health care for people in its custody. U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson issued a sweeping, 302-page ruling in June declaring the mental health care system in Alabama prisons “horrendously inadequate.”
[For more on this story by the SPLC, go to https://www.splcenter.org/news...cause-mental-illness]
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