An Ankle Shackle is No Cure for Mental Illness
The nightly call of “pill line, pill line” from the guards at US Penitentiary Lompoc still echoes in my head. Those magic words sent dozens of men scurrying to the clinic window to collect whatever concoction the institution had decided would make them governable. Many of them actually did suffer from serious mental illness. Much of it was a product of the trauma of incarceration — often related to the oppression of racism and poverty.
The system’s response to such health challenges was cages and medication. As we know, cages are not appropriate sites for mental health therapy. Now, to make matters worse, authorities are using a new form of cage to hold people with mental illness — the technology of electronic monitoring (EM). At Challenging E-Carceration, we are getting an increasing number of stories about people on ankle shackles trying to deal with mental illness.
I recently had an email from a man who had served time in the Feds and was now being held under house arrest. He was supposed to pay a healthy daily monitoring fee which he could not afford. The Fed probation folks added a new twist to debtor’s prison — they wouldn’t let him out of the house for his mental health appointments until he paid his EM fees. Even a letter from his therapist to the probation officer didn’t yield a response.
There’s a couple irrational assumptions here. The first is that somehow keeping him in his house would push his bank balance into the black and he would be able to pay those outstanding debts; second, that keeping him from his mental health appointments would somehow help make it all better.
If this was the exception to the rule, I wouldn’t even mention it. But there are many cases where the home becomes the cage that exacerbates mental illness. I interviewed a woman from Chicago who helps run a program for largely Black and brown youth who have been involved with the criminal legal system. One of the young people in her program, who had been traumatized by violence in his community, was on electronic monitoring. When it came time for his doctor appointments, the probation officer insisted that he would only permit movement outside the young man’s house if he got a FAXed letter signed by the mental health provider.
Not surprisingly, the doctor was in no rush to write that letter. In fact, the woman from the program said sometimes it took weeks and many calls to finally secure a letter. Then when she would try to send the FAX, the probation department number was frequently disconnected. When the FAX machine did finally work, she was so afraid of what might happen that she instructed the young man to carry a copy of the letter with him en route to the appointment. She was terrified the police might stop him and arrest him for being out of the house without permission.
There are more problems. A mother of a young man on a monitor in Michigan told us how his house arrest terms required him to answer phone calls to his home landline in the middle of the night ( they still use landlines!). But the medications prescribed for him often put him in a very deep sleep so he couldn’t hear the calls. When his mother answered one of the calls and tried to explain, they reminded her that it wasn’t her parole, it was her son’s. They warned her that a non-reply by her son might mean incarceration.
Understandably, this response threw his mother into a panic. Every time the landline rang she rushed to her son’s bed to wake him up. To top it off, her son kept getting letters threatening to send him back to prison if he didn’t pay off his delinquent electronic monitoring fees of $13 a day. The stress of the EM regime led her to conclude, “It’s my parole…I have to plan my whole life around his schedule.” She was particularly upset that he was even on house arrest given his illness. “How do you help a person stay sane if he has to stay in the house from Friday night to Sunday?”
These examples only scratch the surface of the complexities of dealing with mental health issues while on a monitor. We want to hear more stories from you or your loved ones about facing the challenge of EM with mental illness. Only by getting these stories out can we begin to pressure authorities to stop pretending electronic monitors are an alternative to incarceration when they are an alternative form of incarceration. We need human solutions to human problems not e-carceration.
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