Panorama.S2014E26.Bedlam.Behind.Bars
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00:00More than a million Americans with mental health problems are behind bars.
00:07I don't know how he could sleep in this noise.
00:11Some are abused, beaten, and sprayed with chemicals by the very people paid to look after them.
00:18I'm done. I'm done.
00:21Some have even died.
00:23I swear this world's gone mad.
00:25Nobody seems to care about anybody, especially a person with mental illness.
00:30These are leg irons and this is a belly chain.
00:33They face indefinite periods of solitary confinement.
00:37It's just abundantly clear that we have criminalized mental illness.
00:42Tonight, Panorama goes behind closed doors to uncover America's new bedlam.
00:48Hey! Hey! Right here! Right here!
01:05In a prison in Michigan, a man is in trouble.
01:09This is Tim Souders.
01:11He's being taken to solitary for breaking prison rules.
01:16The guards are filming all this as is standard practice.
01:21Tim was jailed after stealing paintball guns.
01:25He's bipolar and suicidal.
01:29From the very first, Tim started going downhill.
01:32He started writing letters home about how difficult it was.
01:36He wasn't seeing a doctor regularly, a psychiatrist.
01:39Tim was complaining over and over that he couldn't sleep, that he was having trouble with his medication.
01:45A heat wave is on.
01:47Approximately 15 minutes ago, the prison began flooding its cell.
01:51There's water being shut off, even as we speak,
01:54and we're going to place the prisoner on top of bed and streets.
01:57Tim flooded his cell, so the guards began to chain him to a concrete slab.
02:07By the next day, Tim's clothes were soaked in urine.
02:11He tried to rip them off.
02:13He became delusional.
02:15I see an arrow. I see a soldier. Sorry.
02:21Eleven more hours passed without a break.
02:27That evening, Tim somehow freed his arms.
02:31The guards chained him back down.
02:34Wrong hand where you were the last time.
02:36Do you hear me? Do you hear me?
02:42On the fifth day of this, Tim was moved to another cell.
02:46Can you move your hand up by your mouth?
02:48He was fed with his chains on.
02:52We couldn't treat an animal the way they treated Tim.
02:58They would put the food on his chest,
03:01and he would try to move his hand to be able to feed his mouth,
03:05and in the video it shows his food falling off his chest onto the floor.
03:14That afternoon, Tim died of heat and dehydration.
03:20His mother didn't find out how he had died until weeks later.
03:25The Department of Corrections kept telling us Tim had passed away in his sleep.
03:30They never told us he was in observation.
03:33They never told us that he was in four-point restraints.
03:37They never admitted to anything.
03:43Eight years later, and few Americans have heard of Tim Souders.
03:47In 21st century America, you'd think his death would have changed the system.
03:52But we've heard otherwise, and set out to investigate.
03:57First stop, Chicago.
04:01And Cook County Jail, home to 10,000 inmates.
04:07We were given access.
04:10Every morning, about 250 new inmates are processed into the largest jail complex in America.
04:17But they're not quite the criminals you might expect.
04:20What were they worried about?
04:23By accident, this jail is also now one of the largest mental institutions in the country.
04:29Do you hear voices when you're very, very depressed?
04:34Staff screen inmates to see how many have serious mental conditions.
04:38Today it was 30%. Yesterday it was 50%.
04:42So you're mopping up all the people who can't get mental health care elsewhere?
04:47Really?
05:04Every inmate in this unit has a severe mental health problem.
05:11This man told us he paces to drown out the voices in his head.
05:1630,000 mentally troubled people pass through this jail every year, mostly for petty crimes.
05:23At least here in jail, they can get some care.
05:28But the man who runs the jail, Sheriff Dart, says it's no place to get well.
05:33It's just abundantly clear that we have criminalized mental illness.
05:39Do you think there's any psychologist that would say,
05:41I'm going to put you in a four by eight room with a complete stranger
05:44who's suffering from some mental illness different from yours,
05:47feed you three meals a day while you're associating with people who are charged with various crimes.
05:52There's no one in their right mind that would ever say that's an acceptable treatment plan for anybody.
05:56But that's in effect what happens frequently throughout jails throughout the country.
06:03This is a low security section of the jail.
06:06We're here to be shown how the staff cope with mentally troubled inmates.
06:09But there are allegations of abuse.
06:13Throughout the jail, there are security cameras.
06:16Watch the officer coming around the corner.
06:22He's been suspended and is being prosecuted following an internal investigation.
06:31We met Isaac, a 33-year-old schizophrenic.
06:35As with all of those on remand, we're not allowed to state details.
06:40He told us four guards assaulted him for standing up at the wrong time.
06:45There was a struggle.
06:46One guard pushed my head down really hard on metal armrests.
06:52I had bruises around my ankles because they shackled me.
06:55I had a bruise over here and a bruise over here somewhere.
07:00And a bruise over here.
07:02And when they finally took the handcuffs off, the handcuffs were bloody.
07:08The jail told us Isaac has never filed any kind of complaint about the alleged incident.
07:13A legal case against the jail alleges 45 assaults by officers on inmates last year.
07:19Many against inmates with severe mental health problems.
07:23Most are said to have taken place behind the walls of the jail's two maximum security divisions, 9 and 10.
07:30We were given rare access to division 10.
07:36600 prisoners in this division have mental health problems.
07:39They can be hard to manage.
07:42This unit is where they're disciplined.
07:47Inmates call it the hole.
07:49Men often spend 23 hours a day locked in.
07:53We could film, but not speak to the inmates.
07:56I've been trying to kill myself and everything.
07:59Because usually when you're here, they help us.
08:02Now they ain't going to help us.
08:04Sorry, we'd like to talk to you, but we're not allowed to.
08:06The lawyers behind the class action have spent hundreds of hours with inmates, cataloging their allegations.
08:13The use of pepper spray on people who are handcuffed, beating people who are handcuffed on the ground,
08:20kicking them, stomping them, having large numbers of officers congregate and attack detainees,
08:27all of that is occurring with regularity in divisions 9 and 10.
08:30These cells, they nasty. They not sanitized. They never come over to let us clean up.
08:36There's mold in the cell.
08:38The prisoners have complained to the lawyers of raw sewage in the cells, of filth and vermin.
08:44He's asleep.
08:48I don't know how he could sleep in this noise.
08:51We're going to have to do something about this.
08:54We're going to have to do something about this.
08:57I don't know how he could sleep in this noise.
09:01We met a prisoner who was released from Cook County's maximum security division in 2012.
09:07Kyle Pilishavsky has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
09:11He'd been driving recklessly and injured another driver.
09:15He says guards, angry at him for allegedly causing a power cut, got inmates to beat him up.
09:21One of the inmates just punched me in the face.
09:26And I fall to the side because I was sitting on my bunk.
09:31And they just start hitting me and kicking me.
09:36And I ended up with my eyes swollen shut, my entire head basically purple.
09:43Prison guards basically did everything, in charge of everything.
09:47They just got a couple lackeys with them to help out.
09:53Cook County Jail paid Kyle compensation, suspended the guards and referred them to prosecutors.
10:00It says it's working with the Department of Justice to ensure the well-being of inmates,
10:05adding that the majority of its officers act in a professional manner.
10:09We're constantly monitoring our system, and when we may have any instances that require our special attention,
10:15we place the focus there.
10:18And this is a system that is built on people that want to do the right thing.
10:23We provide services, we provide programs, above and beyond what the Department of Justice agreed order requires us to do.
10:32So I would ask, if that was an institution that was bent on torturing inmates,
10:38then why would we provide such services?
10:41But the class action that alleges 45 assaults last year claims there's a culture of brutality in Cook County Jail.
10:49I put that to Sheriff Dart.
10:52There have been a lot of accusations.
10:54Yeah, there have been a lot of accusations.
10:56And we'd like to know, what I'm asking you, do you think this is untrue?
10:58Absolutely this stuff's untrue.
11:00And the parts of it we've been piecing together, mind you,
11:03we feel very comfortable that their allegations are not going to be sustained.
11:06The work of running a jail is very complicated and very difficult.
11:12And do we have instances where employees don't always follow all the rules?
11:17Yes, and when we find out that information, we pursue them,
11:21and depending on what the conduct is, we give the discipline appropriate,
11:25or we attempt to fire people, whatever it may be.
11:27Are there still issues throughout the place?
11:29Yeah, because I challenge you to try to run a place of this size.
11:33Challenge it. You couldn't do it.
11:35Allegations of violence against inmates aren't confined to Cook County Jail.
11:40Across the country, one of the most contentious issues is the use of force in cell extractions,
11:46when prisoners refuse to leave their cells.
11:54A cell extraction is underway in the California State Prison in Corcoran.
12:00There's a 31-year-old man behind this door.
12:04He was hearing voices and refused to take his medicine.
12:09To get him out, they pumped pepper spray into his cell, repeatedly.
12:28A federal judge has just ruled this was cruel and unconstitutional.
12:32The prison told us it was proper procedure at the time,
12:35adding it's since tightened its rules on the use of pepper spray.
12:44Why has it come to this?
12:46What are more than a million Americans with mental health problems doing in jails and prisons in the first place?
12:53The country is littered with closed asylums, like this one in Peoria, built in 1902.
13:01Half a million souls were once abandoned, many abused in various facilities around the country.
13:10Scenes like this came to symbolize a failing system and prompted widespread closures.
13:21A better system was planned, based on community care.
13:32We traveled hundreds of miles down to Texas, where the historic failure of those grand plans is glaring.
13:40This oil-rich state has almost the lowest mental health care budget per head in the country.
13:52We went on patrol with the Houston police, who were picking up the pieces of a broken system.
14:02An emergency call comes in.
14:08A man with severe mental problems has been behaving erratically. He's in a property with guns.
14:20This man was released from a psychiatric hospital this morning.
14:24With an acute shortage of hospital beds here, short stays are the norm.
14:29Long-term care programs are scarce, too.
14:39It's been hallucinating, seeing people in the trees.
14:59Without beds or adequate community care in today's America, an entire section of the population has been neglected.
15:09There's about 4-5% of Americans who experience serious mental illness in any given year.
15:16We know that approximately 1.5% of Americans experience serious mental illness in any given year.
15:24We know that approximately 1.5% of those individuals do not receive needed services.
15:32So half of the people in this country with mental problems can't get the care they need? That's appalling, isn't it?
15:38That's approximately. And we need to do a much better job and have the will and the desire, frankly,
15:46to increase the community capacity to provide services.
15:54This man needs long-term care, not handcuffs.
15:58One of America's leading psychiatrists believes the plan to prioritize community care over modern hospitals was flawed from the start.
16:06It is appalling. They have subscribed to the political correctness that the old mental hospitals were terrible places
16:13and they can't be any worse off in the community.
16:16Well, it turns out they can be worse off in the community if they end up in jails and prisons.
16:22We were allowed inside Houston's main jail, Harris County, and into one of its mental health units, considered a model facility.
16:33These inmates, deemed relatively stable, live observed behind glass.
16:38Set apart from the rest of the facility is the suicide unit.
16:43This man, an acute case, has been stripped naked and put in a smock.
16:48He will be locked in a tiny cell, alone.
16:52Around 24,000 Americans with mental health problems are being held in solitary confinement.
16:58Not so different from the old days.
17:00These are leg irons and this is the belly chain.
17:04And it goes around the waist, it has two cuffs, and it keeps his hands in this position here.
17:10So hopefully, if he's in one of the single cells, the isolation cells, he can't do anything to himself.
17:16In here, the temperature was frigid.
17:19Seclusion, the jail said, can keep inmates safe and be therapeutic.
17:23Again, we weren't able to speak with the inmates, and the prison staff.
17:26The U.N. says more than 15 days of solitary may amount to torture, even if you're of sound mind.
17:33For people with severe mental illness, it appears that it's much worse.
17:38You have hallucinations, delusions, you have disordered thoughts all going on.
17:43For that reason, a lot of the examples of self-mutilation come from people who are in solitary confinement.
17:49This inmate, we were told, had been in a single cell for 109 days.
17:54We're not allowed to name her.
17:57Down the hall, another inmate had been segregated for 387 days.
18:02The average time in solitary in Texas is three years.
18:07Some Americans have been held in solitary for more than a year.
18:11The U.N. says it's the longest period of solitary in the U.S.
18:15The average time in solitary in Texas is three years.
18:18Some Americans have been held in segregation for decades.
18:22Is there a limit as to how long an individual inmate can spend in one of those cells?
18:29Everything is on a case-by-case basis.
18:32But by and far, the greatest number of those individuals are in multi-cell units.
18:39So the population you're talking about is truly the fraction of the overall number.
18:45We saw some individuals today who had been in these single cell units for months.
18:52What benefit is it to these inmates to keep them for so long?
18:56I am the keeper of bodies that the criminal justice system brings to me.
19:01And so ultimately, it's a question better posed to the district attorney.
19:06The district attorney wouldn't comment.
19:09But the Texas Commission on Jail Standards told us inmates can be held in segregation indefinitely.
19:16This is Paul Schlosser.
19:20We were given access to him in a prison in Maine.
19:24Paul, a former army medic convicted of armed robbery, is bipolar.
19:31When this video was taken, he had spent two months in segregation in the Maine Correctional Center in Wyndham.
19:38The medicine he'd had wasn't working. He begged for more.
19:43I end up getting about four a day, instead of the six I should be getting.
19:47Well, there's a solution to this.
19:49Tell me, please.
19:51The solution is, stay out of prison.
19:56Paul began to mutilate himself.
19:59You need to leave the bandages alone on your arm.
20:03Well, if you don't give me my medication on time, I'm in a pretty immediate issue right now.
20:07I would cut up because of the depression and not seeing really any end in sight.
20:13A couple times it was with razors. If, you know, they allowed us to shave, I'd break a razor.
20:18It was to cause, you know, serious injury.
20:25The guards taunted him.
20:27Cutters don't die. That's my personal experience.
20:30You just wait until they drop and then you sweep them up.
20:33Instantly, when I cut up, it's this total, like, almost at peace.
20:39You don't feel that emotional pain.
20:41And then it just gets to a point where you feel that's really you're only out.
20:50Paul kept pulling the bandages off his wounds and demanding medication.
20:54So staff moved him, saying later it was to get him treatment.
20:59They put him in a restraint chair, the devil's chair, as some call it.
21:05And wheeled him into another room.
21:08Paul has hepatitis. He spits at a guard.
21:13That liquid they sprayed in his face is a highly potent pepper spray.
21:18The manufacturers say it should only be used at a minimum distance of six feet.
21:24I started panicking.
21:25I started panicking.
21:27You're immobilized, so you have no way to kind of cover your face.
21:31And it's just very claustrophobic, not being able to breathe and being strapped in.
21:37It burns your eyes. It burns your ears.
21:41It burns any sensitive areas on your body.
21:45It definitely seemed like I was tortured.
21:47Keep talking and breathing. Keep talking. Keep talking.
21:52Maine's Department of Corrections declined to comment on the incident,
21:56but told us that the captain in charge still works as a corrections officer
22:00and has direct contact with inmates.
22:04Paul Schlosser survived his ordeal.
22:09But we had started cataloguing cases of other mentally troubled inmates across the country
22:13who'd been subjected to chemical sprays, restraint chairs, or beatings, and who had died.
22:20Your eye colour's really hard to get, didn't you? What colour?
22:25Cases like that of Joshua Messier from Boston.
22:28He showed no signs of mental problems as a boy.
22:32In his late teens, though, he became delusional.
22:35During a schizophrenic episode in a psychiatric hospital, he struck a nurse.
22:39He was sent here, to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, a prison for the criminally insane.
22:46One night, Joshua's mother came for visiting hours.
22:49She said Joshua was terrified.
22:52He was a shy country kid.
22:55And him saying to me,
22:57Mom, there's people in here that have killed their grandparents.
23:01And he was scared. He was scared.
23:04Joshua said goodbye to his mother and left the visiting area unescorted.
23:10The guards ran to restrain him.
23:14Some of what happened next was captured on security cameras.
23:19Joshua screamed he was having a schizophrenic episode.
23:23The prison says he lashed out.
23:26But, in the end, there were at least four guards restraining him.
23:29He was beaten so badly that, on autopsy, he had something known as subdural hematomas,
23:34which are bleeds on his brain.
23:37In another room, they started strapping Joshua down to a bed.
23:41First his legs.
23:43They don't stop there.
23:46They take his torso and press it into the tops of his legs,
23:51compressing it.
23:53And then they put him on a stretcher.
23:55They take his torso and press it into the tops of his legs,
23:59compressing his diaphragm. You can't breathe like that.
24:02And then one guard, I think he weighed about 235 pounds, he was about 6'2",
24:08lays on his back.
24:10And they hold him that way for minutes.
24:13Until there's not a sound.
24:16And they lay his lifeless body back.
24:19Joshua died after his chest was compressed and his heart stopped.
24:24The state's chief medical examiner first declared it a homicide.
24:28But then things changed.
24:31The corrections commissioner at the time said that everything was appropriately and professionally done.
24:37The authorities later said one of the officers who'd put his weight on Joshua had lost his balance.
24:44You got the evidence of a death certificate?
24:46You got the evidence of a death certificate saying that it's homicide?
24:50You have the evidence that it's on video.
24:53A kid walks into a room, call it a cell, call it a room, alive.
24:58There's six people there that get on his back and he's dead.
25:04How are those people not in jail?
25:07The authorities have now acknowledged that the officers shouldn't have compressed Joshua's back
25:12and say they've improved staff training.
25:14But five years on, the officers have yet to be prosecuted
25:19and were recently put on leave pending further investigations.
25:23I swear this world's gone mad.
25:26Nobody seems to care about anybody.
25:29Especially a person with mental illness.
25:32Nothing's been done. Nobody's been prosecuted.
25:35And I heard that some of them, their punishment was they had some time off, paid time off.
25:41They got a vacation for killing my son.
25:46Across America, in virtually all the cases of death and abuse we've recounted here,
25:52the mistreatment was initially either denied, sanctioned or covered up.
25:56So, how far does this go?
25:59The U.S. government couldn't tell us how many inmates with mental problems have died.
26:03So, we did some research of our own.
26:05Over the course of making this program, we've collected the names of almost a hundred such individuals
26:11who've died of abuse or neglect since 2003.
26:15The actual number is likely to be much higher.
26:19We put our findings to the Justice Department in Washington,
26:23but they declined to be interviewed for this program.
26:26Instead, they pointed us to a number of facilities around the country
26:30which they're investigating for the abuse and neglect of inmates.
26:35But there are wider questions to answer about the failures of the mental health care system.
26:40The man in charge of federal mental health programs says there's a limit to what he can do.
26:47Everyone in America blames everybody else for this problem.
26:50No one wants to take responsibility for it.
26:52We will take responsibility and we're doing all that we can in order to do it.
26:57But within the resources that we have, again, 80% of our funding going to people with serious mental illness.
27:07We need to do a lot more and this country needs to do a lot more.
27:14In Boston, Joshua's mother, Lisa Brown, is seeking justice for her son
27:19and for the hundreds of thousands of Americans with severe mental health conditions behind bars.
27:24What makes anybody think that we're going to fix this crisis by throwing them in jail?
27:32I mean, it's not going to fix the crisis. It's just going to make it worse.
27:38Most Americans think of widespread brutality against the mentally troubled as just a shame of the past, but it's not.
27:46I think in terms of the history of 20th century America,
27:49our failure to treat people with severe mental illnesses and the consequences is really one of the great social disasters of the century.
27:56And I think it will be regarded in retrospect as something we'll be very ashamed of.
28:03One evil has given way to another.
28:07America's jails and prisons have become its new asylums.
28:12Next Monday, ISIS, terror in Iraq.
28:16Panorama witnesses the fighting and investigates the terrorist organization that has declared an Islamic state and is recruiting British jihadis to join it.
28:41For more UN videos visit www.un.org