Teaching Inside: On Mental Health and Solitary Confinement

Yesterday, I started my day chatting with Chandra just about my adjustment to Petey Greene and overall social justice stuff. Chandra is formerly incarcerated, having spent 6 years at York Correctional Institution. We chatted about her latest Instagram post where she talks about the dangers of solitary confinement (a.k.a. “seg”), the 6x9 box where she spent, in aggregate, 75 days. I cannot even imagine solitary confinement. I don’t WANT to imagine solitary confinement. I get borderline claustrophobic in small spaces I VOLUNTEER to be in; seg would drive me batty. But Chandra is a G, basically, and she has taken her time spent at York, in gen pop and in seg, and turned it into the creation of a literary voice so clear and powerful that she has been featured here, here, and here — just to name a few spots.
So after wrapping that conversation, it was time to head to my out of state inside teaching gig and work with the women who are in the process of building their own businesses — both nonprofit and for profit. One woman, Student A, is writing a book to 1) help children struggling with mental health challenges understand that they are not alone and 2) provide parents a helpful way to talk to their children about mental health. Up until this point, Student A positioned her passion for this endeavor as growing from her experiences with her son who suffers from mental health challenges. But yesterday she shared that not only did her son suffer; she was able to recognize her son’s problems, pre-diagnosis, because she recognized them in her own behavior. It was a powerful revelation (one that she has given me permission to relay to you all) and I was struck by how well she has processed not only her own experiences, but has used the lessons learned to help her son. Unfortunately, the system to which she had been taught to turn did not help her son until he became destructive; fortunately, however, he did receive treatment and she says he is living his best life.
Student A’s book, about a “scaredy cat named Bella” (bootleg copyright right now: if ANY OF YALL take this idea, there will be consequences and repercussions, dammit!), is so well written and vividly illustrated. I have received permission to share one of the illustrations here, where Bella has acted out and found herself all up in the window blinds (Student A says her cat used to do this so she was real familiar with what it looked like LOL).

Student A has managed to turn the lessons learned about mental health into something helpful for families. Some other folks, who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, continue to battle mental health issues. One of the things that makes mental health SO much worse in the carceral context is solitary confinement.
In one of my classes I teach a student who has spent 70% of the past month in seg. Like, understand that. For 21 out of the past 30 days, this student has been in a 6x9 cell. I cannot imagine the damage that can do to a person who does NOT suffer from things like anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder. I, then, even moreso cannot imagine the damage that 21 out of 30 days can do to someone diagnosed with those disorders.
I hadn’t seen this student in class in a while and I was excited; the student always brings such a great energy to class; they are a critical thinker. But that day that they returned to class, something was different. Now, I’ve been in prison classrooms since Fall 2016 and while I am certainly no expert in recognizing mood shifts, I am pretty decent at reading people and understanding when the behavior they are presenting is different from what they have presented to me in the past. This student was, in class, withdrawn though trying to participate at the level to which they were accustomed. It was clear, to me in that moment, that perhaps the other students should embark on the activity I had planned and that I should just sit and chat with the student. It didn’t help that the time in seg had prevented the completion of the most recent assignment, so the one-on-one time would be helpful for more than one reason.

I sat down next to the student, as others had moved around the room for the activity, and asked what I thought was a fairly innocuous question: “Hey, how are you?” And I learned, in that moment, that that question, when asked of someone only recently released from seg, is not innocuous. It is not innocent. It is not unloaded. It is not appropriate.
And I immediately felt like an asshole for asking it. Just, legit. I felt so damn stupid. And insensitive. Like, how is the student supposed to feel? What was I expecting them to say? Ugh.
The student followed up with, “I’m just. I don’t know. I feel like seg is breaking me.”
#lesigh
I don’t know how many of you have actually seen someone broken, or in the process of becoming broken. It is awful. It is like seeing life in their eyes, their face, and their movements in one minute and seeing pain and lifelessness the next. The student, if you can imagine, just seemed smaller, taking up less space, feeling like less, maybe having internalized BEING less. They continued to share more things that communicated to me that they felt they were losing themselves. I felt like I was looking at Kalief Browder and I felt this surge of panic because there is absolutely nothing I can do. While the student spoke in language of accountability for self and their decisions to engage in behaviors that would lead to seg, I heard not someone taking responsibility for wrongdoings; there is, perhaps, the tiniest bit of relief/release in that recognition and acknowledgement. No, this sounded like a person so broken that all they could manage to articulate is what other people have told them about themselves.

After that class, I sat in my car in the parking lot, unsure what to even think. I began to wonder if what I’m doing is even making a dent within this context of absolutely dehumanizing behavior. I felt discouraged, disheartened, and just downright sad for like 20 minutes. But then I heard the words of Patti Labelle in my head. “Beat your face into place, get back in the race.” And so I did. I taught my other classes, have had other conversations, and have felt renewed in many different ways, but my student’s face continues to haunt me. I don’t want them to be the next tragedy about which the world reads.
