Nicholas Ganz

David C. Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, had a must read blog at Huffington Post yesterday called Supermax Prisons: Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading.

Honestly this particular point that he makes in his blog cannot be stressed enough in my opinion:

The mentally ill are vastly overrepresented in supermax prisons, and once subjected to the stress of isolated confinement, many of them deteriorate dramatically. Some engage in bizarre and extreme acts of self-injury and even suicide. In an Indiana supermax, a 21-year-old mentally ill prisoner set himself on fire in his cell and died from his burns; another man in the same unit choked himself to death with a washcloth. It’s not unusual to find supermax prisoners who swallow razors and other objects, smash their heads into the wall, compulsively cut their flesh, try to hang themselves, and otherwise attempt to harm or kill themselves.

This is torture, pure and simple. We are caging mentally ill people in prisons at a increasingly higher rate. Again this brings to mind Angela Davis’s contention that prisons exist to disappear the problems that society doesn’t want to or refuses to address. This must END.

For those living in Illinois who would like to take action on this issue of Supermax prisons, I would like to refer you to a terrific organization called TAMMS Year Ten.