Jack*, a loner by nature, requires a single-man cell to remain mentally stable in prison. He requires nothing else; just to live alone.
In Georgia, prisoners deemed to have mental health issues are classified as Mental Health levels 1 through 4, with Level 5 reserved for acute crisis stabilization. Jack was not classified with any mental health concerns when he came into prison. But as the judicial industry continued to pump more and more human beings into the same-sized space, and rather than expand horizontally the corrections industry decided to stack us on top of each other, Jack’s quest to live alone grew more serious.
One day a new cellie was assigned, and when he came to move in Jack wouldn’t let him. The living unit officer wrote Jack a disciplinary ticket. At the hearing Jack was sanctioned with 90 days’ loss of privileges and ordered into a different cell the same size, but with three bunks instead of two.
Jack continued in his quest, hoping to find a sympathetic ear at some point up the chain of command, but at each level the punishment only increased until the warden sent Jack to solitary confinement in the Special Housing Unit (SHU). “Solitary” cells are doubled up these days, so now Jack was locked behind a steel door all but five hours out of the week, still with a cellie.
His cellie was in the SHU due to having stabbed someone, but at this point in the story Jack has not really broken any rule at all, other than declining to have a stranger move into his house or vice versa.
After 30 days in the SHU to contemplate the error of his ways, Jack was returned to general population. It was true that his previous strategy had failed, so he switched to a new one. He requested an appointment with his counselor, sat down across the desk from him, and cut his own forearm from the wrist up to the elbow.
“It had to look real to be taken seriously,” Jack told Filter. The intent was not to die, but without immediate medical attention we can assume he would have.
If you’re prescribed mental health medication and don’t take it voluntarily, your mental health classification level goes up.
After being whisked off to the hospital, treated and returned to prison, now Jack was reclassified as a job for the mental health staff. They placed him in a suicide watch cell, which is true solitary confinement—no clothes, no bedding, isolation 24 hours a day other than someone asking him why he wanted to kill himself.
I’m not interested in killing myself, Jack responded. I am trying to live in a constitutionally allowed manner. Y’all keep ignoring my request.
Jack was told he had a chemical imbalance in his brain that was causing irrational behavior. He was prescribed something to neutralize the behavior. He declined to take it.
My mind is fine, he contended. The way to maintain its health is to have a cell of my own, to rest in after doing all my required prison-life stuff.
If you’re prescribed mental health medication and don’t take it voluntarily, your mental health classification level goes up. Soon you forfeit the right to consent and can be forcibly injected with whatever staff deems appropriate. Usually haloperidol (Haldol) and chlorpromazine (Thorazine).
The nurse who’d brought the medication looked at Jack, shivering in his paper gown but otherwise perfectly calm as he described his nonviolent protest, and called in a Tactical Squad. A five-person team entered the suicide watch cell with batons and a shock shield. They assume maximum resistance regardless of the situation. Jack was violently, traumatically flattened on the floor and injected with his medication, and was still there when the time for the next dose rolled around.
The second time Jack refused the medication, he tried to recant his refusal upon arrival of the Tactical Squad. They proceeded exactly as they had the first time.
So once that ice was broken, he seemed to have two choices. Continue getting injected and maybe die of dehydration while drooling into the floor, or swallow the pills and exist in a semi-lucid trance state while attempting to work his way from Mental Health Level 4 back down to Level 1.
Over the next four years, Jack was permitted to wean off and then discontinue the meds, placing him at Level 2. He conceded to living in open dorms and triple-bunked cells. He went back to work and tried to exhaust himself to sleep, despite the overly close quarters and the recently acquired trauma.
In the corrections department chain of command, staff psychologists are vested with powers that in some situations outrank even the warden.
All this was always avoidable. The head of the mental health department has the authority to prescribe, on the advice of a psychologist, a non-pharmacological treatment such as the housing assignment that would keep Jack sane; there’s no reason it should have to mean isolation 23 hours a day, either. In the corrections department chain of command, staff psychologists are vested with power that in some situations outranks even the warden’s. Unfortunately they’re often reluctant to exercise it.
Maximum-security solitary confinement is the most expensive way to house a prisoner, and once reserved for only those who were unable or unwilling to report to their assigned work detail. Unlike Jack, who was both able and willing to work but could not do so from the SHU.
The response to Jack’s quest to be housed in a constitutionally allowed manner, rather than as a product stacked on a warehouse shelf, comes from the same mistaken concept used to justify the grossly inadequate medical care and the food unfit for human consumption: that prisons are the locations where criminals are supposed to receive various punishments. When in fact being in prison is the punishment in and of itself. The Mandela Rules say the same thing:
Imprisonment and other measures that result in cutting off persons from the outside world are afflictive by the very fact of taking from these persons the right of self-determination by depriving them of their liberty. Therefore the prison system shall not, except as incidental to justifiable separation or the maintenance of discipline, aggravate the suffering inherent in such a situation.
In December 2024 a Georgia Senate committee recommended moving toward a system redesign in which all prisoners across the state are housed in single-occupancy cells, and only let out for one hour each day unless it’s to go to work. And that’s really all Jack was asking for. But because it was something he wanted, it was viewed as a luxury he didn’t deserve. View it as a punishment instead, and suddenly all of us can have it.
*Name has been changed to protect source
Image (cropped) via Brown County, Wisconsin
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