MENTAL HEALTH ALTERNATIVES TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT (MHASC)

MHASC is a coalition of more than sixty organizations and hundreds of concerned citizens, advocates, mental health and criminal justice professionals, formerly incarcerated people and their family members, working to end the cruel practice of placing people with psychiatric disabilities in solitary confinement.

Imprisoned people in solitary confinement (known also as disciplinary confinement, Special Housing Units (SHU), and Keeplock) spend twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day in barren concrete cells. Many of these individuals have mental health needs. Despite experiencing the ravages of psychiatric symptoms, such vulnerable prisoners are subjected to sensory deprivation, social isolation, and enforced idleness – conditions that are extremely harmful to anyone’s mental health but devastating, and even life threatening, for people with psychiatric disabilities.

MHASC successfully advocated for the enactment of the SHU Exclusion Law, which restricts the placement of prisoners with serious mental illness in disciplinary confinement. Although the law was enacted in 2008, it did not take effect until July 1, 2011. To learn more about the SHU Exclusion Law, check out our Fact Sheet.

The Mental Health Project coordinates MHASC’s advocacy efforts to ensure that the law is fully implemented and results in meaningful reform. Through legislative advocacy, we work to preserve and expand upon the law. We meet regularly with the NYS Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, which, as a result of the SHU Exclusion Law, is responsible for oversight of prison mental health care. In addition, MHASC developed a family committee to improve the prison mental health system’s response to family members of imprisoned people with psychiatric disabilities. We also give presentations on the plight of people with mental illness in prison and on the SHU Exclusion Law.

To get involved in MHASC or schedule a presentation, contact Jennifer (jj) Parish at 646-602-5644.

NEW YORK CITY JAILS ACTION COALITION (JAC)

JAC is a collection of activists, including formerly incarcerated people, family members, and other community members, working to promote human rights, dignity, and safety for people in New York City jails. Its current advocacy projects aim to curtail New York City's use of solitary confinement as a jail punishment, stop staff brutality, and improve the quality and availability of medical and mental health care.

Even as a growing international consensus has deplored the use of solitary confinement in jails and prisons, New York City has expanded it. By the end of fiscal year 2013, solitary confinement beds will represent nearly ten percent of the average daily population in New York City jails. Solitary confinement, or what the city calls "punitive segregation," entails 22 to 24 hours of daily lockdown with limited social interaction. It causes, among other things, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, paranoia, psychosis, and self-harm. Juveniles and people with preexisting mental illness remain the most vulnerable to the ravages of "the bing," yet New York City subjects ever more of them to solitary confinement.

Staff brutality on Rikers Island has continued unabated for decades despite scores of lawsuits against correction officers. Members of the highest echelon of the Department of Correction have been identified again and again as perpetrators of gruesome violence against incarcerated people. Such assaults have left its victims without their eyesight, with broken spines and faces, punctured lungs, lacerated skulls, and other serious injuries.

JAC aims to end the culture of brutality in New York City jails by influencing necessary changes in the culture of the Department of Correction. New York City must treat the people it incarcerates as people, not as problems.

Crucial to reforming the culture on Rikers Island is increasing the quality and availability of medical and mental health care and rehabilitative programs. By treating symptoms of mental illness and physical disease, rather than punishing them, New York City can help its incarcerated people to heal. And by engaging incarcerated people with programs, the city can help them to succeed when they return to the community.

Several Mental Health Project staffers are core members of JAC, dedicated to utilizing our expertise to oppose conditions that are detrimental to incarcerated people's mental well-being.

To learn more about JAC, contact Dilcio Acosta at 646-602-5666 or visit JAC’s website (www.nycjac.org).