Prison Madness

A Disturbing and Shocking Expose-A Passionate Cry for Reform Prison Madness exposes the brutality and failure of today's correctional system-for all prisoners-but especially the incredible conditions Andured by those suffering from serious mental disorders. "A passionately argued and brilliantly written wake-up call to America about the myriad ways our penal systems brutalize our entire culture. Dr. Kupers not only diagnoses the problem, he also offers a set of solutions. I hope this book will be read by all concerned citizens and voters, for it conveys truths that are vitally important to all of us." —James Gilligan, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic

"Ethnographically rich, thick with gritty details and original insights, Rhodes's revelatory book about US prisons--those who are incarcerated in them and those who run them--should be read by everyone who cares about social justice and the nature of power."—Emily Martin, author of Flexible Bodies "Thank you, Lorna Rhodes, for taking us to where the 'worst of the worst' are kept out of sight and out of mind in the new millennium. This powerful ethnography of the correctional high tech machine reveals how institutional power suffocates individual agency and redefines rationality and insanity. Good, bad and evil fall by the wayside."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio "A truly remarkable book. The inside look at supermax confinement alone is worth the price of admission, and the prose sometimes verges on poetry. This is meticulous scholarship."—Hans Toch, author of Living in Prison

The focus of this book is on the government of prisoners with mental health problems in England and Wales over the last twenty-five years. The wider context and backdrop to the book is the shift to 'late modernity', which, since the 1970s has seen massive structural change in most Western societies, affecting the social, economic and cultural spheres, as well as the field of crime and punishment. This book investigates whether these profound transformations have also led to a reconfiguring of responses to mentally vulnerable offenders who end up in prison. Specifically, it explores how this group of prisoners has come to be viewed increasingly as sources of 'risk', requiring 'management' or containment, rather than as people suitable for therapeutic responses. The book draws on primary research carried out by the author, including interviews with key informants involved in the field during this period, such as former cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, campaigners and academics. In conducting this investigation, the author has developed a method of research which combines and synthesizes different forms of analysis to create a novel approach to socio-historical research.

Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York’s chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse. In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced. With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no‐holds‐barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.

“A haunting and harrowing indictment . . . [a] significant achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist * New York Times Book Review Paperback Row * Time Best New Books July 2020 Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American jails and prisons. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones. Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. This expertise—the mind in crisis—has enabled her to reckon with the human stories behind mass incarceration. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.

An urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.

This book explores the frightening ways our prisons mirror the worst aspects of society-wide gender relations. It is part of the growing research on men and masculinities. The collection is unusual in that it combines contributions from activists, academics, and prisoners. The opening section, which features an essay by Angela Davis, focuses on the historical roots of the prison system, cultural practices surrounding gender and punishment, and the current expansion of corrections into the "prison-industrial complex." The next section examines the dominant or subservient roles that men play in prison and the connections between this hierarchy and male violence. Another section looks at the spectrum of intimate relationships behind bars, from rape to friendship, and another at physical and mental health. The last section is about efforts to reform prisons and prison masculinities, including support groups for men. It features an essay about prospects for post-release success in the community written by a man who, after doing time in Soledad and San Quentin, went on to get a doctorate in counseling. The contributions from prisoners include an essay on enforced celibacy by Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as fiction and poetry on prison health policy, violence, and intimacy. The creative contributions were selected from the more than 200 submissions received from prisoners. Author note: Don Sabo, Professor of Social Sciences at D'Youville College in Buffalo, is author or editor of five books, most recently, with David Gordon, Men's Health and Illness: Gender, Power, and the Body and, with Michael Messner, Sex, Violence, and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. Sabo has appeared on The Today Show, Oprah, and Donahue. Terry A. Kupers, M.D., a psychiatrist, teaches at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is the author of four books, editor of a fifth. His latest books are Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It and Revisioning Men's Lives: Gender, Intimacy, and Power. Kupers has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases on conditions of confinement and mental health services. Willie London, a published poet, is General Editor of the prison publication Elite Expressions. He is currently an inmate at Eastern Corrections. For nine years he was a prisoner at Attica.

"Ethnographically rich, thick with gritty details and original insights, Rhodes's revelatory book about US prisons--those who are incarcerated in them and those who run them--should be read by everyone who cares about social justice and the nature of power."—Emily Martin, author of Flexible Bodies "Thank you, Lorna Rhodes, for taking us to where the 'worst of the worst' are kept out of sight and out of mind in the new millennium. This powerful ethnography of the correctional high tech machine reveals how institutional power suffocates individual agency and redefines rationality and insanity. Good, bad and evil fall by the wayside."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio "A truly remarkable book. The inside look at supermax confinement alone is worth the price of admission, and the prose sometimes verges on poetry. This is meticulous scholarship."—Hans Toch, author of Living in Prison