[NYAPRS Enews] 'Crazy in America' Profiles Tragedy of Criminalized Americans w/ Psychiatric Disabilities

Tue May 8 09:54:42 EDT 2007

NYAPRS Note: The following provides information about an important and
very timely new book written by a former journalist who has long been a
leading voice in advocating for New Yorkers with psychiatric
disabilities in the criminal justice system. Mary Beth Pfeiffer will be
a featured presenter at this falls' NYAPRS 25th Anniversary Conference
October 3-5 at the Nevele Grande in Ellenville, NY (see www.nyaprs.org
<http://www.nyaprs.org/>  for more details).

Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill

By Mary Beth Pfeiffer

ww.crazyinamerica.com

     The nation witnessed a horrific example of failed mental health
care recently when a mentally ill man killed 32 people at Virginia Tech
in Blacksburg, Va. While his case was extreme -- and rare -- Cho
Seung-Hui was typical of thousands of mentally ill people across America
whose path to jails and prisons was rooted in a deficient mental health
system.     

  In her new book, Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our
Criminalized Mentally Ill, (Carroll & Graf; Publication date: May 22,
2007; $15.95, paperback) Mary Beth Pfeiffer tells the stories of six
people whose mental illnesses thrust them into the arms of police and
into jails, prisons and juvenile facilities that were ill-prepared to
care for them. The results were shocking and preventable: Suicide,
self-mutilation, death at the hands of frightened and poorly trained
police.

    Pfeiffer, a long-time investigative reporter who was a 2004 Soros
Justice Media Fellow, puts a human face on the national scandal in which
thousands of mentally ill people tangle daily with police. Pfeiffer
shows how, once incarcerated, people who are sick are punished again and
again for behavior that is psychotic but not criminal.

     Crazy in America is a book about a society that has abandoned a
segment of its weakest and most vulnerable citizens in an age of
shuttered mental hospitals, anemic community care and tough sanctions
for those who violate the public peace and order. "We have become so
inured to the criminal justice alternative," Pfeiffer writes, "that
there is a growing trend in mental hospitals to arrest patients who
assault staff during psychotic episodes. Not too long ago, these people
would not have been considered candidates for arrest, based-correctly-on
the theory that they had little control over their actions. No more."

    The unforgettable people in the book include Shayne Eggen, a spunky
woman in her 30s who had long believed she was an Indian princess.  She
gouged out both her eyes, in separate incidents, while incarcerated in
Iowa. Pfeiffer recounts the journey that brought Shayne to the gates of
the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women: a diagnosis of
schizophrenia at the age of 14; a succession of mental hospitals from
which she sometimes escaped or was released without follow-up care; and
a crime that could have

been avoided had officials heeded the warning flags that Shayne and her
family were desperately waving.     

     Shayne Eggen went to prison a beautiful woman with long brown hair,
piercing blue eyes and a sickness that overwhelmed the resources of the
Iowa prison system. She emerged -- after spending months in the prison
"hole" - missing teeth from an attempt to gnaw her finger off, scarred
from having chewed a hole in her cheek, and blind to all but a hint of
light. Her eyelids, Pfeiffer writes, hung "like silent curtains over
empty sockets." Among the most challenging inmates in Iowa's history,
Eggen even became pregnant by another inmate, going through labor in
shackles until the moment of delivery. Eggen's story is an amazing one
of will and survival, a story of a woman who was not protected from her
madness -- and was punished for it as well.

    In a recurrent theme of Crazy in America, Pfeiffer shows how people
like Eggen are routinely shunted to the furthest edges of prison society
for unconscionable periods in solitary confinement. The use of such
psychologically harmful confinement came back into fashion in the 1990s
in the form of "supermax" cells and prisons, which have become dumping
grounds for the mentally ill, places where inmates cry, scream and
self-mutilate. Pfeiffer follows Joseph Maldonado and Jessica Roger from
their rocky childhoods in loving but troubled families to their delivery
to a regimen of sensory deprivation that led to their deaths. An
estimated 25,000 Americans are locked in such units, described by judges
as "virtual incubators of psychosis," and "the mental equivalent of
putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe."

    Beyond exposing horrific practices behind bars, this book also tells
the story of a shrunken mental health system that has made police the
first responders in psychiatric emergencies -- with disastrous
consequences. In two of Pfeiffer's profiles, mentally ill men began the
day as unarmed, law-abiding citizens on the verge of breakdown. After
police intervened, they were suspects who had racked up a litany of
crimes such as resisting arrest and aggravated harassment; these charges
ultimately helped exonerate the officers who killed them.

   Since 1990, Pfeiffer writes, an already decimated system of
psychiatric hospitals has lost 57,000 beds - 40 percent of the total.
And while prison budgets tripled in the last two decades of the 20th
century, mental health spending rose by just a fifth. The upshot:
"America's mental health service delivery system is in shambles," a
Presidential commission on mental health concluded in 2002. The nation
rated a "D" in a report card on mental health care in 2006 by the
National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

   The nation's dearth of mental health care coupled with tougher
sanctions for drug use, 

parole violations and other offenses has delivered thousands of mentally
ill people to the halls of justice. America's intolerance of drug
addicts sent Luke Ashley, a 24-year-old Texan with bipolar disorder, to
a jail cell where he hung himself. His offense was to possess two pills
of the drug ecstasy. Luke's mother, Tricia, had been Luke's counselor,
confessor and champion and had advocated for her son on every step of
his terrible journey. But her efforts were no match for an overwhelming
illness -- and a systemic failure. 

    Incarceration has become the answer to too many problems in America,
Pfeiffer asserts. "Prison should be the domain of the truly deserving,
those who rob banks, mug old women, and kill wantonly," she writes. "Yet
it is the place where there is always a bed, where another body and soul
could be crammed in until by 2005, nearly 2.2 million of us were behind
bars." This has made America's lockups into de facto mental
institutions.

    "When someone has a documented history of mental illness," the judge
said in sentencing one of Pfeiffer's subjects, "there ought to be a
place where there could be both isolation and treatment." The problem:
There was no place. And so Jessica Roger, who had been hospitalized 25
times from age 11 to 15 and had committed her crime at 16, went to a
maximum security New York State prison where she committed suicide.
Crazy in America offers a prescription for change so that people like
Jessica, Joseph, Luke and Shayne are offered care and compassion --
rather than handcuffs and a jail cell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Beth Pfeiffer is a widely published journalist, researcher and
author. Her work has appeared nationally and she has won wide acclaim
with awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation, National Headliner
Awards, Inter America Press Association,  National Council on Crime and
Delinquency, New York State Associated Press Association, New York
Publishers Association and the National Mental Health Association, among
others.

Contact: Barbara Monteiro, Monteiro & Company, Inc., 212-832-8183,
bam at monteiroandco.com

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