Use of isolation in juvenile detention centers

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform (PfCJR) CORE ISSUE:  Juvenile justice reform to identify and divert at-risk youth.

Isolation in juvenile detention centers persists despite ample data demonstrating the traumatizing consequences to youth who often already have been traumatized.  Dr. Brittany Raffa writes a poignant piece that was published in the December 1, 2015 issue of Family Practice News regarding the practice.  Highlights:

  • Youth are kept in isolation for several days, with a vague definition by staff on the limit of “several days.”
  • While in isolation or segregation – whatever it is called – mental illness and posttraumatic stress disorder are exacerbated. Youth do not participate in school classes, and they are barred from the daily hour of physical activity.
  • The use of isolation in juvenile centers has led to increased suicide rates in those children.
  • More than 50% of all youths’ suicides in juvenile facilities occurred while young people were isolated alone in their rooms, and … more than 60% of young people who committed suicide in custody had a history of being held in isolation.”

Read the entire article at www.familypracticenews.com

Click here to JOIN PfCJR as a physician or allied member as we advocate for criminal justice reform.

State grants to help mentally ill, drug-addicted Mahoning inmates

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform (PfCJR) CORE ISSUE:  Provision of adequate physical and mental healthcare for inmates.

Mahoning County has been awarded a $150,000-a-year, two-year state grant to help county jail inmates and Community Corrections Association halfway house clients with mental-illness and substance-abuse conditions re-enter the community.  Highlights from the article:

  • Tracy Plouck, director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, was in Youngstown on Thursday to announce the award of Criminal Justice-Behavioral Health Linkages grants to Mahoning and 37 other Ohio counties. – See more at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2015/nov/20/state-grants-to-help-treat-mentally-ill-/#sthash.ekUrLovh.dpuf
  • The grants total $3 million statewide.
  • The goal is to “bring more treatment into the jail and reduce recidivism (repeat offenses) because people are connected with treatment services,” Plouck said.

Read the entire article at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2015/nov/20/state-grants-to-help-treat-mentally-ill-/#sthash.ekUrLovh.dpuf

Click here to JOIN PfCJR as a physician or allied member as we advocate for criminal justice reform.

PRESS RELEASE: PfCJR Officially Partners with the Campaign for Youth Justice to Raise the Age

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, Inc. (PfCJR), which advocates to eliminate the damaging health consequences that can result from negative interactions with the criminal justice system, has officially partnered with Campaign for Youth Justice, a national initiative focused entirely on ending the practice of prosecuting, sentencing, and incarcerating youth under the age of 18 in the adult criminal justice system.

(DECATUR – March 9, 2016) – Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, Inc. (PfCJR) is pleased to support advocacy efforts of the Campaign for Youth Justice by officially partnering to lend the collective voice of our physician members to the national initiative to end the prosecution, sentencing and incarceration of youth under the age of 18 in the adult criminal justice system.

Medical literature reflects that adolescent brains are developmentally different from those of adults, often leading to impulsive decision-making, increased risk-taking and decreased appreciation for long-term consequences of behaviors. As a result, youth, by law, are prohibited from taking on major adult responsibilities such as voting, jury duty and military service. It follows, then, that youth should not be held to an adult standard of accountability when involved with the criminal justice system.

Furthermore, youth in adult jails and prisons are more likely to be sexually assaulted, physically assaulted and, upon release, are more likely to re-offend than youth housed in juvenile facilities. Each of those experiences, as well as early developmental experiences that put youth and adolescents at risk for involvement with the criminal justice system, result in long-lasting, negative physical and mental health consequences that could be avoided by juvenile justice reform that identifies and diverts at-risk youth.

Osvaldo Gaytan, M.D., Ph.D., Director of Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform’s Juvenile Justice Taskforce and a physician with specialties in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Neuropharmacology and early childhood trauma states “Children and adolescents are our future. I think we can all agree on that. As doctors, it is our duty to make a united stand against environmental factors that affect both the mental and physical health outcomes of our patients. Every bit of evidence we have as physicians points to the fact that adolescent brains do not function in an equal capacity as adult brains. Therefore, it is not scientifically sound to equate the functioning of an adolescent brain with that of an adult. It is unjust.”

Please join Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform and the Campaign for Youth Justice on insisting that the legal age for being treated as an adult be raised to 18 years of age as a national standard.

 

About PfCJR:

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, Inc. (PfCJR) was founded by a group of physicians who were struck by the myriad of ways that negative encounters with the criminal justice system lead to detrimental health consequences. We firmly believe that changing the interaction between the criminal justice system and individuals of targeted populations will ultimately lead to improved health of targeted communities.

 

Obama bans solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform CORE ISSUE:  Reform of the juvenile justice system to identify and divert at risk adolescents.

As reported by the Washington Post:

President Obama on Monday announced a ban on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prison system, saying the practice is overused and has the potential for devastating psychological consequences.

Highlights:

  • In an op-ed that appears in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post, the president outlines a series of executive actions that also prohibit federal corrections officials from punishing prisoners who commit “low-level infractions” with solitary confinement.
  • The new rules also dictate that the longest a prisoner can be punished with solitary confinement for a first offense is 60 days, rather than the current maximum of 365 days.
  • While Obama is leaving the details of policy implementation to agency officials, the Justice Department’s report includes “50 guiding principles” that all federal correctional facilities must now follow.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.

Grant provides Vivitrol for county jail inmates

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform CORE ISSUE:  Provision of adequate physical and mental healthcare to inmates.

MANSFIELD – More Richland County Jail inmates will have access to medication-assisted treatment for opiate addictions as a result of a new grant from the state.

The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services this week announced $3 million in grant awards to support 23 projects benefiting 38 counties in an effort to connect offenders with treatment. The goal is to reduce the number of criminal offenders with untreated mental illness and substance use disorders who continually cycle through county jails.

Richland County Mental Health and Recovery Services executive director Joe Trolian said the $148,000 Criminal Justice-Behavioral Health Linkages grant will not only help continue and enhance existing services like counseling and case management for current and former inmates but also add Vivitrol treatment to the lineup of services.

The agency has offered Vivitrol to only a limited number of people since 2014 because funding for the medication and the protocols and treatments associated with it were not available.

Statistics show people who attempt to overcome opiate addictions by quitting cold turkey have a much lower success rate than those who use medication assisted treatment, Trolian said.

 

CLICK HERE to read the full article.

As city jail deaths rise, will reforms help?

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform CORE ISSUE:  Provision of adequate access to physical and psychiatric health care for current inmates.

According to an article in the Daily News section of www.philly.com:

* Seventeen inmates have died already this year, the most since 2007, when 20 died. This year’s dead included one man murdered allegedly by his cellmate, two men who committed suicide, one man whose cause of death remains undetermined and 13 others whose deaths were ruled “natural,” caused by health problems or addictions. The decade’s toll: 168 inmate deaths since 2005, according to prison records.

*  Meanwhile, the inmate population has fallen from a peak of nearly 10,000 in 2009 to about 8,000 today. Philly still has the highest incarceration rate of the nation’s 10 largest cities.

*  Six inmates who died this year – most charged with misdemeanors – could have gotten out of jail for $500 or less, including Parks and another alleged shoplifter, Erin O’Malley, who was held a week on just $100 cash bail, records show.

“The bad luck of the draw is that some people can’t afford to pay even low bail. So then they stay there not because we think they’re too dangerous to be released or won’t show up at trial, but because they can’t afford to pay even a low bail. For those people to die [in custody] is really problematic,” said attorney David Rudovsky, a leading prison reformer.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20151103_As_city_jail_deaths_rise__will_reforms_help_.html#eJowdpUB1flwXlbC.99

Prisoners sue Illinois Department of Corrections over solitary confinement

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform CORE ISSUE:  PfCJR advocates for provision of adequate access to physical and mental health care for current inmates. Will you JOIN us? 

A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday alleges that the Illinois Department of Corrections misuse of solitary confinement is “cruel, inhumane [and] offensive to basic human decency.”

“We send people to solitary for far too long, for far too little,” said Alan Mills, an attorney on the case.

Mills said people can be put in solitary confinement for minor infractions, like rolling their eyes at a guard.

“No one I know has come out of long term isolation without being severely mentally injured,” he said.

Brian Nelson said he spent 23 years in solitary confinement.

“I paced 18 hours everyday and they had to cut blood blisters off my feet,” Nelson said. Consider an animal in the zoo, we don’t put them in an environment like that.”

Nelson said after solitary he had to be on multiple psychiatric drugs and see a psychiatrist. Even five years after his release, he still struggles with daily tasks, like riding a train or bus. CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

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Patient Safety: Moving the Bar in Prison Health Care Standards

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform CORE ISSUE: Provision of adequate access to physical and psychiatric health care for current inmates.

Abstract

Improvements in community health care quality through error reduction have been slow to transfer to correctional settings. We convened a panel of correctional experts, which recommended 60 patient safety standards focusing on such issues as creating safety cultures at organizational, supervisory, and staff levels through changes to policy and training and by ensuring staff competency, reducing medication errors, encouraging the seamless transfer of information between and within practice settings, and developing mechanisms to detect errors or near misses and to shift the emphasis from blaming staff to fixing systems. To our knowledge, this is the first published set of standards focusing on patient safety in prisons, adapted from the emerging literature on quality improvement in the community.

Click here to access the full article.