Human Rights Watch Details Abuses of Prisoners with Mental Disabilities

13
188

“Jail and prison staff throughout the United States have used unnecessary, excessive, and even malicious force against prisoners with mental disabilities,” stated a press release about a new report from Human Rights Watch.

The 127-page report is called, “Callous and Cruel: Use of Force against Inmates with Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons.” According to the press release, it “details incidents in which correctional staff have deluged prisoners with painful chemical sprays, shocked them with powerful electric stun weapons, and strapped them for days in restraining chairs or beds. Staff have broken prisoners’ jaws, noses, ribs; left them with lacerations requiring stitches, second-degree burns, deep bruises, and damaged internal organs. In some cases, the force used has led to their death.”

The full report is available at the Human Rights Watch website.
United States: Force Against Prisoners With Mental Illness (Human Rights Watch press release, May 12, 2015)

13 COMMENTS

  1. Uh, what HRW seems to have missed is, in addition to the same kind of stuff that stuff that would’ve sparked attention at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the compulsory mass administration of body, brain, and soul-rending psychiatric poisons. Or is that in there somewhere too?

    Report comment

  2. Having been released concurrently with the APA’s new campaign to get the “mentally ill” out of jails and into treatment (meaning on psychotropic drugs!), this report might just communicate the wrong message (kind of like out of the frying pan and into the fire!). Whether in prisons, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, or being forced to ingest psychotropic drugs on an outpatient basis, the abuse of the term “treatment” to mean the coercive management of undesirable behavior remains the same. This is really the larger context that HRW should be examining and critiquing.

    Report comment

    • Whether in prisons, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, or being forced to ingest psychotropic drugs on an outpatient basis, the abuse of the term “treatment” to mean the coercive management of undesirable behavior remains the same. This is really the larger context that HRW should be examining and critiquing.

      Exactly.

      Report comment

      • Especially since the DSM has been confessed to be scientifically “lacking in validity” by the head of the NIMH. And ‘Anatomy…’ points out the antidepressants and ADHD drugs create the bipolar symptoms. And this diagnosis often gets patients a prescription for one or more of the neuroleptics.

        And the neuroleptics create both the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia via both the central symptoms of neuroleptic induced anticholinergic intoxication syndrome and neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome:

        “neuroleptics … may result in … the anticholinergic intoxication syndrome … Central symptoms may include memory loss, disorientation, incoherence, hallucinations, psychosis, delirium, hyperactivity, twitching or jerking movements, stereotypy, and seizures.”

        “Neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome is principally characterized by the same symptoms that constitute the negative symptoms of schizophrenia—emotional blunting, apathy, hypobulia, difficulty in thinking, difficulty or total inability in concentrating, attention deficits, and desocialization. This can easily lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment. Instead of decreasing the antipsychotic, the doctor may increase their dose to try to “improve” what he perceives to be negative symptoms of schizophrenia, rather than antipsychotic side effects.”

        Report comment

    • Yeah, because the best way to combat abuse in prisons is to lock people up for life based on pre-crime mentality and subject to brain mutilation techniques along with all the other stuff that happens in prison anyway (I think they may have forgotten to add sexual abuse). Faustian bargain is a nice way to put it.

      Report comment

  3. Again, underpinning all of this is the false notion of “mental illness.” It is a hoax, a plague of epic purportions. If the psychopharmaceutical industrial complex and the therapeutic state can convince citizens of the myth of mental illness, it will ensure their absolute domination. A population kept in constant fear through “anxiety,” “depression,” “bipolar disorder,” “ADHD,” the attendent psychotropic drugs, and incarceration, is a population that is easy to control. The dragon of psychiatry rejoices over her precious hoard of money, but she also rejoices over the slaves that she brings within her evil grasp. Slay the Dragon of Psychiatry.

    Report comment

LEAVE A REPLY