Sedlis Dowdy sat inside a quiet out-of-the-way room inside a maximum security prison in Elmira, New York, deep within layers of barbed wire and rings of heavy metal gates and guard stands.
To get here he had to pass in front of a row of noisy inmates locked in their cells. The skinny, 6-foot-2 inmate walked straight ahead and did not respond. Dowdy is 42 and mentally ill, and he doesn’t like being around a lot of people.
“Now I’m just schizophrenic,” he said. “But before I was schizo affective, bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, depression.”
Dowdy is one of the 9,000 inmates who the state Department of Corrections says are mentally ill, some of them more so than others. Prisons and jails across the country have become the systems of last resort for thousands of people with psychiatric problems. It is a difficult population to manage and when guards are not properly trained, the results can be devastating.
[For more of this story, written by Cindy Rodriguez, go to http://www.wnyc.org/story/voices-inside/]
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