Prison system still wrangling with issue of mentally ill inmates

COLUMBIA – Seven years after a mentally ill inmate being held naked and cold for 11 days died in a South Carolina prison cell, the director of the state’s prison system says he hopes changes for the handling of mentally ill prisoners will prevent such a tragedy from occurring again.

But a year and a half after a judge ordered the changes, the state remains in mediation with advocates for mentally ill prisoners, and the prison system has yet to hire 40 additional mental health and medical workers funded by lawmakers this year.

The confidential mediation talks are complicated and have gone past the goal of reaching a final settlement by July 31, said Gloria Prevost, executive director for the advocacy group that sued the state over the treatment of inmates with severe mental illness.

“There are a lot of complicated issues and there are a lot of things that need to be done,” she told The Greenville News.

Some of the changes will take time to implement, said Bryan Stirling, director of the state Department of Corrections.

The agency is in the process of hiring more mental health workers, but the process takes time, he said, adding that he feels good about the progress the prison system has made since advocates for mentally ill inmates filed a lawsuit against the state in 2005.

“I think it has changed dramatically,” he said.

One hundred officers have been trained in crisis intervention, inmates can no longer be sent to solitary confinement for more than 60 days as punishment, and a pilot program has allowed some of those long held in solitary to transition back into the main prison population, Stirling said.

New inmates are screened more thoroughly for mental health issues, mental health workers are getting proper certifications, and the agency has contracted with a group to follow released prisoners to help them receive mental health treatment in the community, Sterling said.

“After implementing changes to the disciplinary policy, crisis intervention team training and the overall change in agency culture, I would hope that incidents like that will not happen again,” Sterling said of the 2008 death of Jerome Laudman.

Laudman’s death was cited by former Circuit Judge Michael Baxley last year in his landmark, 45-page order finding the state had violated the rights of mentally ill prisoners. The state subsequently paid Laudman’s estate $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit.

Stirling, hired by Gov. Nikki Haley in 2013 to lead the prisons agency, told The News that a federal investigation of the death is ongoing and that earlier this year he requested an investigation by the State Law Enforcement Division. That report has been turned over to a solicitor, he said.

In North Carolina, similar complaints by advocacy groups about the treatment of mentally ill inmates there have been forwarded to the U.S. Justice Department. A federal investigation is ongoing into the death last year of a mentally ill inmate placed in solitary who died of dehydration.

President Barack Obama this summer signaled prison authorities nationwide that he wants to see a change in the way prisons “overuse” solitary confinement.

“The social science shows that an environment like that is often more likely to make inmates more alienated, more hostile, potentially more violent,” he said during a speech last month. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?

“That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger. And if those individuals are ultimately released, how are they ever going to adapt? It’s not smart.”

South Carolina prisons as of June held 1,363 prisoners in solitary confinement, 243 less than in December, officials said.

That is a reflection, Sterling said, of the new policy he enacted earlier this year that no longer allows the “stacking” of time in solitary for disciplinary infractions, which has kept some inmates in isolated cells for years.

Inmates now may not be placed in solitary more than 60 days for disciplinary reasons. They can be held indefinitely, however, if they are deemed a threat to the safety of staff or other inmates, Sterling said.

“The way we are saying it is we are locking up people who we are afraid of, not that we are mad at,” he said.

The prison system does not track how many of the inmates are in solitary for security detention as opposed to disciplinary detention, said Stephanie Givens, a spokeswoman. So officials cannot say how many are being held indefinitely.

Laudman’s final days and evidence of an attempted cover-up by correctional officers were detailed in documents reported by The News last year.

The 44-year-old inmate suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, mental retardation and bipolar disorder, according to documents in a federal lawsuit.

On Feb. 7, 2008, Laudman was moved to the Lee Supermax, cells at Lee Correctional Institution designed to “punish and provide intensive supervision to inmates exhibiting assaultive behavior,” according to the suit. Why he was sent there and who authorized the move remains somewhat of a mystery.

The cell was bare, with a concrete pad for sleeping and no blanket, according to the lawsuit, which alleges that the entire area was cold and there were problems with the heating system.

Inmates told the prison investigator after Laudman’s death that they had tried to get officers to look at Laudman, believing something was wrong since he wasn’t eating and not making his usual noises, according to the report. An officer told them that it was “out of his hands.”

On the last day of Laudman’s life, Feb. 18, 2008, one of the officers repeatedly told a supervisor that “Laudman needed help,” and was lying in his own feces, according to the internal report. The nurses said that he was unresponsive, with a pulse of 50 and pupils that were fixed and dilated.

Laudman was taken to a hospital, which later reported he was suffering from hypothermia and had a core temperature of 80.6 degrees. He later was pronounced dead from cardiac arrhythmia.

Baxley wrote in his 2014 order that an investigative report found Laudman had been “physically abused” by a correctional officer during his cell transfer and that a prison investigator later “found evidence of an attempted cover-up by correctional officers” who cleaned the cell before investigators could photograph it.

Stirling said if something like the Laudman case happens again, “I will take that very seriously and there will be consequences for anybody who was involved in it.”

He said in addition to changing the disciplinary policy, the prison system also had conducted a pilot program at the McCormick Correctional Institution to transition those who have been in solitary back into the prison population using a stepdown process.

“We didn’t want to release people without kind of re-acclimating them back to the general population,” he said.

In addition to addressing solitary, the state is hiring new mental health or medical workers over the next three years.

The Department of Corrections is in the process of hiring 40 workers at a cost of about $4.9 million, having received the money for hiring them last month, but it takes time to go through the state hiring process, Stirling said.

“This is just the first year,” he said. “I told the plaintiffs and they agreed that we could not hire all these people we need to hire in one year. It’s going to take some time.”

The agency, Stirling said, is looking for additional psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, activity therapists, clinical supervisors and quality assurance monitors who can evaluate the treatment system.

Among those the agency is trying to hire, he said, is a mental health recruiter, someone who will help the agency find the dozens of mental health workers the agency needs; and mental health technicians, workers who have mental health and security training. The agency also is addressing pay inequities among mental health workers.

“It’s a challenge, I’m not going to lie,” he said. “But this is going to be something that hopefully they can say for the rest of their careers, ‘I went to the Department of Corrections and I made a difference.’”

The agency also is eliminating use of pink jumpsuits, which had been required for years for inmates who he said were sexual exhibitionists. He said the jumpsuits when first used seemed to work well but have not been as effective in more recent times.

Bill Lindsey, executive director for the South Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which has helped in training correctional officers, said he believes the direction of the agency under Stirling in the area of mental health “is just so much better than what we had before.”

“We have a long way to go,” he said. “But it looks like he is moving in the direction to get things done. He had a massive undertaking going into that situation. But it looks like he’s really trying to put things together to make it a lot better situation.”