State ordered to improve treatment of mentally ill
Declaring the "days of dead wood in the Department of Corrections are over," U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen ordered state prison officials immediately to improve care of mentally ill inmates and stop using restraints as punishment.
"Here is the basic message," Enslen said Monday in an opinion directed at state corrections officials. "You are valuable providers of life-saving services and medicines. You are not coat racks who collect government paychecks while your work is taken to the sexton for burial."
The ruling is the latest in a 25-year-long legal battle over the quality of health care in the Jackson prison facilities. The portion of the case dealing with mental health care was closed five years ago, but Enslen ordered it reopened, due to the recent deaths of mentally ill prisoners.
He gave the state 45 days to develop a plan for increased staffing of psychiatrists and psychologists in the Jackson prisons, known as the "Hadix facilities," after one of the inmates who filed the class-action lawsuit. Corrections Department psychiatrists and psychologists immediately must begin making daily rounds in the segregation unit at Jackson, where many mentally ill inmates are held, Enslen ordered.
He also directed the department to improve coordination between the prison medical and mental health staffs.
The ruling is the result of a three-day hearing last month during which attorneys for the inmates cited case after case in which mentally ill inmates died due to inadequate care. Most compelling was a surveillance video showing the deterioration of a 21-year-old inmate, Timothy Joe Souders, who was shackled to a cement slab for most of four days in August.
Enslen ordered the state to stop using four-point restraints as punishment, except in certain rare cases.
Souders, identified only as T.S. in court records, died apparently due to heat stress and dehydration, although the results of his autopsy have not yet been made public. Souders had a history of mental illness, including bipolar disorder.
One prison nurse's failure to act on Souders' obvious decline could amount to "criminal negligence," Enslen wrote in a footnote to his 39-page opinion.
"Say a prayer for T.S. and others who have passed," he wrote. "Any earthly help comes far too late for them."
The Aug. 17 death of Philip Hayes, a Grand Rapids man serving a life term for murder, rape and armed robbery, also should have been avoided, Enslen said. Due to his mental illness, including paranoia, Hayes, identified only as P.H., declined treatment for hyperthyroidism, Enslen wrote. A psychiatrist's request that the Corrections Department seek a court order requiring Hayes to undergo treatment was delayed more than a month in the bureaucracy. He died before the order could be issued.
Such negligence, Enslen said, amounts to torture and violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. He noted that President Bush recently signed a law prohibiting the torture of prisoners, including the use of irons, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"If the punitive use of irons is to be prohibited as to foreign unlawful combatants, then ... its use should be prohibited within Hadix facilities out of deference to those inmates' constitutional rights."
Enslen concluded with a warning to Corrections Department officials and Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the for-profit company under contract to care for Michigan's prisoners. Anyone who fails to provide proper care "may be arrested," he wrote, adding: "The days of dead wood in the Department of Corrections are over, as are the days of CMS intentionally delaying referrals and care for craven profit motives."
"I couldn't have said it any better," said Ann Arbor attorney Patricia Streeter, who represented the inmates. She called the ruling "a wonderful opinion for the prisoners' civil rights movement" and "a very strong condemnation of the use of four-point restraints."
A Corrections Department spokesman declined comment, saying officials there had not had time to read the opinion.
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