Repost 🔁: Solitary Confinement for 8 Months

Photo by Clelia Jane Sheppard

I’d like to recap in this post today an article I read in the Virginian-Pilot from 2018, “How One Woman Survived Her Mental Illness Isolated in Jail With Only the Voices in Her Head for Company” .

Although hitting her husband on the head with a frying pan wasn’t exactly great, she was also really ill at the time and completely unaware of her symptoms. The state inside one’s mind can be so poorly misunderstood, labeled, judged and gossiped about-punished. Instead of medical attention through the lens of finely tuned education, the sickest most vulnerable people are left attended by the personality profiles most likely to mimic the Stanford Prison Experiment dynamic.

Women’s Prisons/Jails are filled with Domestic Violence Survivors: https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2022/08/domestic-violence-prison-abuser-oklahoma-new-york-law/

She leads a quiet life now, at age 56, but fondly remembers her horse Cindy. From happier days.

She doesn’t want her mental illness to rule her life, but keeping it from doing so takes constant maintenance.

“I just get worn out by the disease,” she says. “You hit a wall with it.”

But make no mistake, the life she has today – her house, her freedom, even her ability to speak – is a victory. The mistreatment she survived in America’s justice system has killed or broken hundreds if not thousands of others.

She spent 8 months of a 2.5 year sentence in solitary confinement, in a 10 by 6 cell, with only scribblings from previous inmates as a source of stimulation.

The cell is a converted bathroom. She’d like to use the shower, but the water doesn’t turn on. It only drips from the pipe where a shower head used to be. The sink doesn’t work well either. She always asks for an extra cup of Kool-Aid to quench her thirst when the jailers bring her food.

She knows she is charged with domestic violence, but she doesn’t know how long ago she was charged or how long she’s been in jail. She tried to keep a calendar, but time has little meaning when day and night blur together in the glaring fluorescent lights.

In Jan’s cell, there is no room for a bed. She has to lay her mattress pad down in the shower over the drain. When she sleeps, water drips on her from the pipe.

She fixates on the few things inside the cell that move or change. The leaking pipe, the cold air blowing down on her from a vent in the ceiling, the filthiness of her skin.

In a study, a researcher Dr. Stuart Grassian, noted inmates in solitary confinement get a sort of “tunnel vision.” Their attention gets stuck on something unpleasant. They can’t stop thinking about it.

There is nothing to distract her from the voices in her head – the whispers and muddled thoughts that arise from her untreated schizophrenia. The jail has done little to treat her disease.

She has an imaginary friend – an old boyfriend who was kind to her. They talk sometimes, and he makes her less lonely.

Really, Jan is trapped in a cell within a cell. There’s the physical one inside the jail, and there’s the one inside her mind created by her isolation and her untreated illness.

On July 5, 2009, Jan was arrested on a domestic violence charge. She was booked into the Valencia County Detention Center. A note was put in her jail file describing her as suffering from hallucinations and recommending that she see a psychiatrist as soon as possible.

But instead of receiving treatment, Jan was pepper-sprayed and put in isolation after refusing to wear jail clothes. She was released about two weeks later but was arrested again in September on another domestic violence charge and placed in isolation.

She was placed in the bathroom cell.

For Jan, the low point came when a male guard taunted her with a menstrual pad.

She was sitting in her cell, miserable, her legs covered in blood. She had been given no feminine hygiene products and was having her period.

She looked up at the window of her cell. A male guard was waving the sanitary napkin at her. This had all happened before. The female guards were usually understanding. The male guards were not.

“The young man was arrogant; he didn’t think I needed what I asked for,” she said.

Already there were empty food trays uncollected and strewn about. She was using the paper bags from her sack lunch as toilet paper because none had been given to her.

Even when she did get sanitary napkins, she didn’t get enough. When she was given one, she’d often need to reuse it. Once, she was even taken to court in bloody clothes. Other inmates laughed at her.

“That was humiliating, sitting in that mess,” Jan said. “There’s times I’m sure they didn’t know. … I would have to beg for things, and half the time there wasn’t anybody that could hear me.”

She rocked herself all the time and talked to her imaginary friend.

At times she was given a Bible in the cell.

“I prayed and read a lot when I had it,” she said.

She had a hard time talking to anyone who came to her cell window.

“You know, I couldn’t help my condition,” she said. “I acted out sometimes, you know.”

She said she yelled at and threatened the guards.

“I mean, I was sick. I was frustrated and I was in pain,” she said. “I was being neglected.”

Jan’s children had not forgotten about her. Middendorf said they were constantly calling, trying to figure out how to get her medical attention.

Eventually Jan’s daughter got in touch with Joe Chavez, the warden at the detention center. Chavez declined to comment for this story.

“My initial approach was to try to get as much information as I could,” she said. “I didn’t want to damage that very precious connection that I had. … I had to play nice with someone that I knew was not on my mom’s side.”

At one point, Jan was allowed to return home to Minnesota as long as she complied with treatment. Her family did not realize just how sick she was until she got there.

She was so ill that complying with her treatment wasn’t really possible. She’d see the Pepsi logo and think it was an eye, someone spying on her. She missed an appointment because in the clinic parking lot, she saw a red car. She was too scared, repeating over and over again the words, “red blood, red blood.”

She was ordered back to the jail in New Mexico.

On Aug. 18, 2011, about 23 months after Jan’s arrest, Rebecca Granger, a nurse in charge of health care at the jail, came to visit her. She found her in a psychotic state. She asked her if she needed medical help. Jan, her mind consumed by her illness, replied that she was a doctor and did not.

In her file, Granger wrote that Jan “denies mental health complaints” and left her untreated in the cell.

Along with schizophrenia, she also suffers from PTSD from her time in isolation. It is triggered by a number of things. Loud noises. Locked doors. Police.

“I had it rough and I lived it. It was hard,” she said. “I still have my fallbacks. I get depressed. … Every time I have to ask for help it brings me down.”

According to the most recent report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 18 percent of local jail inmates, nearly 134,000 people, spent time in some form of isolation – restrictive housing, disciplinary or administrative segregation or solitary confinement – in 2011 and 2012. The study estimated that 5 percent of jail inmates had spent at least 30 days under such conditions in the previous 12 months.

The report also noted that solitary confinement is more common for those with mental illness – between 23 and 31 percent of prison and jail inmates with a history of mental-health problems spent time in isolation.

Studies have found being locked up alone can make someone without a mental illness break down, sometimes in a matter of days.

In an often-cited 2006 study, psychologist Grassian found that isolation frequently created “an agitated confusional state which, in more severe cases, had the characteristics of a florid delirium, characterized by severe confusional, paranoid, and hallucinatory features, and also by intense agitation and random, impulsive, often self-directed violence.”