Researching Prisons

Just a quick note to help keep me on track with posting.

I'm still having trouble using my writing time to write. I think I'm intimidated. But I'm getting better at remembering to write, and feeling like I want to. I think I'm digging back out of that weird funk I fell into around Christmas (jeez, it took me long enough).

I wanted to work on my original story, but the next couple chapters take place in a prison, and my personal knowledge of such things is limited to what they show on TV. So, I decided to do some research, not only on prisons in general but specifically on the psych wards and on some local prisons that I might use as the setting. I'm going to try to use real places when I can, but altered slightly to reflect the AU we're in.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that we don't really have psych wards. What we have is regular prison and isolation. That's a bit of an oversimplification, but it appears that our prison system is vastly underserving the needs of its mentally ill. For starters, we don't really have mental asylums anymore, with the result that upwards of 60% of our prisoners have mental illnesses (probably most of them are understandably depressed, though). Psychiatrists don't make their rounds, prisoners are prescribed old, cheap generics or nothing at all, and the wardens use isolation ("a night in the box) to punish prisoners for exhibiting psychologically unbalanced behavior, such as suicide attempts.

Yeah, that's right. They put suicidal prisoners into sensory-deprivation isolation.

I think that's Hell on earth, in the real and actual meaning of the word - a place away from God. I also think that's cruel and unusual. Even in regular rooms, the prisoners are often denied the right to have property, such as magazines. What the eff to they do all day?!

The prison where my character lives isn't as bad, since the East Coast prisons seem to be regulated a bit more. The really bad ones are the privately operated industrial prisons in the Midwest. I doubt anyone in the government gives a flying fuck what they do to people out there. Out of sight, out of mind.

However, one of the prisons I might use is New York's Rikers Island, which apparently has a ward where a reporter went to talk to the prisoners and found about half of the cells were covered in Plexiglass, such that she could only hear them if they shouted. The wardens explained that the Plexiglass was "for the shit-throwers." We have hundreds of shit-throwers? Really? That was the only way the prisoners could express themselves?

I had begun my research because I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally over-dramatize the prisons. Now I realize I was under-dramatizing them. Nothing I could have thought of would be as bad as the reality. I find this grimly humbling.