DePaul’s Center for Public Interest Law hosted a discussion Wednesday morning that addressed the plight of the mentally ill currently living in the Illinois prison system.
Maya Szilak, a policy and research specialist at the John Howard Association, and Amanda Antholt, a senior attorney at Equip for Equality, advocate for prison reform and the rights of prisoners suffering from mental illness.
Nearly 48,000 men and women are currently being held in Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) facilities. It is estimated that about 20 percent of those inmates require care for mental health issues.
However, limited resources and overcrowding in the state’s prisons have restricted IDOC’s ability to properly care for its mentally ill inmates. Most of these inmates do not receive the treatment they require to remain stable and are therefore more likely to act out and end up in segregation, also known as solitary confinement.
“What it comes down to is you’re in one little, tiny cell about 22 hours or more a day. In those conditions, most people’s mental health deteriorates because even people who go in without mental illness sometimes come out with it,” Antholt said.
For many inmates with a pre-existing mental health condition, ending up in segregation is a vicious cycle. As their mental health continues to worsen, inmates in segregation often misbehave more frequently and are then “ticketed,” resulting in an even longer stay in segregation.
One of Antholt’s clients, who suffers from severe mental illness, was charged with aggravated assault while in segregation when he bled on a prison guard’s shirt after banging his head on a wall out of frustration because the guard would not allow him to shower before a court appearance.
That inmate, along with 11,000 other IDOC inmates, was a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed against the state of Illinois in 2007. In the lawsuit, inmates with mental illnesses claimed the lack of access to adequate mental health treatment constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The case settled in December 2015, when the state agreed to provide residential treatment centers and more than 300 new clinical staff to treat inmates with mental health issues. Both of these measures are meant to curb the number of mentally ill inmates who end up in segregation.
The cost of building new treatment centers is estimated to cost about $40 million, while the additional personnel is estimated to cost the state $40 million annually.
These numbers are hard to swallow in a state that is drowning in debt and currently functioning without a budget. Szilak and Antholt believe, however, these reforms are necessary in order to protect the rights of mentally ill inmates.
Lynn Cahill-Masching, the former warden of the now-closed Dwight Correctional Center for women, said that although major changes have been made, she believes the system as a whole needs to change.
“Corrections get such a bad rap … (they do) the best that they can but minimal resources and staffs are not trained for mental illness, they’re trained for jail management,” Cahill-Masching said. “We spend 40 hours on weapons qualifications and we should spend 40 to 80 hours on communication.”
Szilak also pointed to the defunding of mental health programs and community centers as a contributing factor to why prisons have become the new mental health hospitals. According to the Chicago Tribune, Illinois cut $113.7 million in mental heath services funding between 2009 and 2012, and Cook County Jail has since become the largest mental health provider in Illinois.
