As someone who has loved ones who struggle with mental illness, the treatment
of the mentally ill by a carceral cultural which often criminalizes difference
has long been deeply personal for me. It is one of countless areas in which we
need to defund traditional police and reallocate resources to social workers,
counselors, mental healthprofessionals and others far better suited to address
a mental health crisis than persons whose primary response is to shoot first.
Charles
People With Mental Illness Face Acute Dangers During and After Police
Encounters (truthout.org)
People With Mental Illness Face Acute Dangers During and After Police Encounters
Police arrest a protester in West Philadelphia on October 27, 2020, during a
demonstration against the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Walter Wallace, a Black
man, by police. Wallace's family said he suffered mental health
issues.GABRIELLA AUDI / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
- BY
- Victoria Law,
- Truthout
- PUBLISHED
- July 11, 2021
On February 25, 2019, Karrie Schaaf drove to the local emergency room,
desperate to find help for her son Darik.It was not the first time she had
sought help. But because Darik, a Black man then in his mid-20s, was legally an
adult, medical and psychiatric staff had repeatedly told her that they could
not offer help unless he sought it himself.This time, hospital staff called the
police. When two deputies from the Riverside sheriff’s office arrived, Schaaf
told them that her son was feeling suicidal and begged them to intervene. But,
she recalled, no one went to their house to check on him. Exhausted, struggling
with her own mental health, and worried that she might say something to make
her son feel worse, Schaaf checked into a hotel for a few days. She emphasizes
that, at no point, was she ever afraid of her son.
Three days later, the sheriff’s office asked her to come to the precinct. She
panicked, assuming that Darik had died by suicide and they were asking her to
identify his body.When she arrived, she said that deputies interrogated her
about her son’s behavior. Exhausted from work, sleep deprivation and constant
worry, she tried to convey her fears that Darik might harm himself. What she
didn’t realize was that her words would be used to justify arresting and
charging her son with several felonies, which, if convicted, could mean a life
sentence. Darik has remained in jail awaiting trial ever since.Schaaf, who is
white, emphasizes that she made a conscious decision not to call 911 on her
Black son and instead turned to the local hospital for help. She had long known
that calling 911 when Darik was in crisis could be a death sentence. Her fears
are not unfounded: The Treatment Advocacy Center estimates that at least one
quarter of all fatal police encounters are of people with serious mental
illness. Furthermore, just as police are more likely to brutalize or kill Black
men than their white counterparts, they are also more likely to kill unarmed
Black men who exhibit signs of mental illness than white men demonstrating
similar behaviors.“I guarantee that if Darik were white, we wouldn’t be talking
right now,” Schaaf said.Darik Schaaf sits with his dog, Old Man Reggie.COURTESY
OF KARRIE SCHAAFWhen questioned by police later, Schaaf attempted to make them
understand that her son needed help. The entire ordeal, she says, stems from
“asking for help — and look where we’re at.”Schaaf didn’t realize that her
son’s mental health crisis — and her pleas for help — could be twisted into a
series of criminal charges with a possible lifetime prison sentence.Schaaf
didn’t realize that her son’s mental health crisis — and her pleas for help —
could be twisted into a series of criminal charges with a possible lifetime
prison sentence.Darik’s situation is mirrored in other stories from around the
country. Police-perpetrated violence against people with mental illness has
gained more attention lately — but even those who survive encounters with law
enforcement are not in the clear. People with diagnosed mental illnesses make
up a disproportionate number of people behind bars. Nearly half (44 percent) of
people in local jails and 37 percent of people in state and federal prisons
have a diagnosed mental illness. Even when they are not prosecuted and
imprisoned, becoming entangled in the legal system can have far-reaching
ramifications for those diagnosed with mental illness and mental health
disorders.
“Labels of Disability Can Be Leveraged to Confine People”
A diagnosis of mental illness can mean an increase in criminalization,
advocates say.“Labels of disability can and have been leveraged to confine
people,” stated Dustin Gibson, co-founder of Disability Advocates for Rights
and Transition. That confinement isn’t limited to jails or prisons; they also
include psychiatric hospitals and facilities, which can hold people for
lengthy, if not indefinite, periods of time under similar conditions.“Disabled
people cycle between jails and psychiatric institutions often,” noted Talila A.
Lewis, an attorney and the director of HEARD, a cross-disability abolitionist
organization. Lewis explained that if a person is arrested and their
“competency” — or ability to understand the criminal charges and assist in
their legal defense — is called into question by an attorney or judge, they are
sent to a psychiatric institution (or sometimes held in the jail) for
evaluation. A judge can order “competency restoration” if the defendant is
found to be incompetent during a subsequent competency hearing. Restoration
often involves coercive “treatment” including forced medicating. If deemed
restored or restorable by “experts” and the court, the defendant will remain
confined in a medical or carceral institution as they face criminal charges.
Or, if the defendant is deemed not restorable or incompetent, after months or
years of failed competency restoration measures, charges against them could be
dismissed, but the person can be recommitted to a psychiatric institution for
an indefinite amount of time using civil commitment laws. Alternately, they may
be released only once they meet exacting residence, guardianship, and other
requirements.That’s the cycle that 43-year-old Siddharta Fisher has been pushed
into for the past 25 years.His mother, Cindi Fisher, traces his entanglement
with the criminal legal and psychiatric systems to his childhood — and the
systemic racism he faced as an adolescent. In the 1980s, the Fishers were one
of the few Black families in Vancouver, Washington (where Black people make up
less than 3 percent of its population today). Nonetheless, the young Siddharta
thrived in school, winning chess championships and academic accolades.Nearly
half (44 percent) of people in local jails and 37 percent of people in state
and federal prisons have a diagnosed mental illness.When he entered junior
high, however, Fisher heard complaints from teachers who accused her son of
disrespect. “But when I talked to my son, I found out it was because he was
holding the teacher to the same rules they had for the kids. Like you don’t
call the kids ‘knuckleheads’ or berate them. He would call the teachers on
that,” Fisher recalled. This was in the 1990s. The term “school to prison
pipeline” had yet to be created, but Siddharta’s experience reflected what was
occurring in schools around the country — Black students were more harshly
disciplined than their white counterparts. This included — and still includes —
disproportionate rates of suspension and expulsion as well as arrests for
incidents which could (and, advocates say, should) be handled internally by
school officials.That’s what happened to Siddharta. In seventh grade, he
intervened when classmates stole another student’s coat. The next day, when he
attempted to return it, the principal accused him of stealing it. When
Siddharta wouldn’t name the culprits, the principal called the police, who
arrested him and brought him to juvenile detention. He was confined for a week.
That, Fisher said, changed the trajectory of his life. “He had always been
taught that if he did the right thing, things would turn out right,” Fisher
stated. That experience taught him otherwise.Siddharta began skipping school
and running away. At 15, he was arrested after a friend stole a gun from a
classmate’s home during a party. He also began showing signs of dissociation,
talking to himself and having breakdowns. At 17, after he stole his mother’s
car, authorities recommended that she bring him to a psychiatrist. The
psychiatrist recommended risperidone, an antipsychotic drug used to treat
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.Less than three months later, Siddharta
began showing signs of akathisia, an acute movement disorder characterized by
an inability to sit still. He also began self-mutilating — cutting and burning
himself. He complained that the medications caused him pain, but, when Fisher
brought him to the emergency room, physicians dismissed his complaints. One
morning in June 1995, seven months after beginning risperidone, he woke his
parents. The dead, he said, were coming through the floorboards. He accused his
parents of poisoning him before leaving the house and knocking on doors in an
adjacent neighborhood to seek help. When no one answered, he broke a window
before collapsing in the street. When the police arrived, Cindi Fisher
recounted, he told them he had been poisoned and begged to be brought to the
hospital. Instead, they took him to jail.Six months later, court evaluators
declared him unfit to stand trial and ordered him to Western State Hospital for
competency restoration. It would be the first of over a dozen arrests and
hospitalizations.The issue of confinement for “competency restoration” is a
widespread one. In 2015, Disability Rights Washington and the American Civil
Liberties Union filed Trueblood v. DSHS, a class-action lawsuit charging that
Washington took too long to provide competency evaluations and restorations.
Meanwhile, people languished in jails — often in solitary confinement and often
without mental health care — exacerbating their conditions. A federal court
agreed and ordered the state to provide competency evaluations within 14 days
of a court order, and competency restoration services within seven days of the
evaluation.Even before the coronavirus pandemic, that timeline was met only an
average of 24 percent of the time. In 2020, that number dropped to below 7
percent — and sometimes as low as 2 percent. That includes Siddharta, who, in
2020, spent four months in jail awaiting an evaluation and three additional
months awaiting transfer to Western State Hospital for competency restoration.
During those seven months, he was in solitary confinement, a common placement
for those with mental health issues.The idea of competency, noted Gibson,
“can’t be divorced from a broad spectrum of disability because it’s built
around the idea that disabled folks of all kinds need to be under surveillance
and confinement.” This includes making a person’s release contingent on
limiting where they can live or surrendering control over their own finances.On
April 12, 2021, Siddharta was approved for discharge. He remains confined until
the social worker arranges housing through the approved social service agency.
Fisher has said that she has informed the social worker of two programs which
provide housing and peer support, enabling Siddharta to be discharged more
quickly. “Over institutionalizing is no less harmful and illegal than
discharging to the streets,” she wrote to the hospital administration on June
22, 2021. “Such overinstitutionalization, according to statistics, negatively
impacts recovery gains, wasting taxpayers’ dollars, and increases Siddharta’s
risk of reinstitutionalization.”This surveillance and confinement is not
limited to people experiencing mental illness which, Lewis noted, is in itself
a disability. It also extends to people with other disabilities, including deaf
people, and people with intellectual/developmental disabilities, traumatic
brain injury, epilepsy and dementia, among other disabilities. Lewis also
underscored that many disabled people have more than one disability.
Psychiatric Hospital Expansions
In 2018, the federal government pulled $53 million of annual funding from
Western State Hospital for failing to comply with standards. Inspectors found
that staff had restrained a patient for hours without cause; they also found
violent assaults on patients and staff and numerous unauthorized patient
“walkaways.” By then, the state had accrued more than $55 million in fines for
repeatedly failing to meet the Trueblood timeline.“Having a mental health
crisis is not a crime.”In 2021, the Washington state legislature approved plans
for a new Western State Hospital with 350 forensic beds, or beds for those who
have been deemed incompetent to understand the criminal charges pending against
them. Lawmakers also announced the creation of smaller in-patient facilities
for civil patients, or patients who are not facing criminal charges, by 2023,
allowing Western and Eastern State Hospitals to concentrate solely on
competency restoration.However, says Lewis, these reforms do not challenge the
problems with the idea of “competency” itself.“The application of concepts of
competency and due process are deeply flawed,” stated Lewis. “Ableism,
anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression are baked into medical and legal
processes and inform lawyers’, doctors’, judges’ and jurors’ understanding of a
person’s competence, culpability and character.” Furthermore, Lewis noted that
deprivation of freedom and bodily autonomy are being perpetrated under the
guise of “securing due process,” “treatment” and “care” despite the fundamental
unfairness of the criminal legal process and violence of medical
incarceration.Fisher doesn’t think that more psychiatric beds, even in smaller
facilities closer to home, is the solution, pointing to a recent Seattle Times
investigation exposing the failures of Washington’s private psychiatric
hospitals.Instead of smaller versions of the psychiatric hospital, Fisher wants
alternatives where those in crisis can go “that’s not going to chain them up,
lock the doors behind them, or force medicate them.” She is now involved in
pressing for the resurgence of the Soteria House model. Started in the 1970s,
Soteria House was a residential home for people newly diagnosed with
schizophrenia. Instead of hospitalization and psychiatric interventions,
Soteria House operated as a safe haven, similar to today’s peer respites,
voluntary residential houses where nonprofessional staff treated residents as
peers rather than patients in need of psychiatric intervention.“We understand
the need for respite for people who are wealthy, white, or otherwise in
positions of power when they make the same request under a different name,”
explained Lewis. “For them it is called vacation or sabbatical. But when people
who are houseless or traumatized, or living through deprivation and precarity,
need something similar, they are labeled lazy, pathologized, or criminalized.”
“A Concrete Cage Has Been My Son’s Reality”
Darik Schaaf remains in Riverside County’s Blythe Jail. His mother Karrie
cannot afford the $1,040,000 bail set by the court or the 10 percent ($104,000)
required by a bail bondsman. “My son has not been found guilty of anything, but
because we’re poor, he’s been sitting in jail,” she said.Despite being the
alleged victim, Karrie says she has not been contacted by the district
attorney’s office. “I’ve been very clear about my stance,” she told Truthout.
“I’m not supporting these charges.”The Riverside district attorney’s office did
not return Truthout’s request for comment. In June 2020, it opposed Schaaf’s
motion for a mental health diversion program. The judge agreed and ruled him
ineligible for the diversion. Karrie Schaaf was devastated.In January 2021,
Karrie came across a post for the Riverside chapter of All of Us or None, a
national network of formerly incarcerated people fighting for their rights. She
attended a virtual meeting where she spoke about her son’s incarceration. She
has also connected with family members whose loved ones have been fatally shot
by police responding to mental health calls. Members have helped organize
protests outside the district attorney’s office, calling for them to drop
charges against Schaaf. They’ve also launched an online petition demanding that
Darik be released into a mental health diversion program.So far, their demands
have not been met or responded to. Schaaf’s next court date is July 30,
2021.“My son is not a criminal and having a mental health crisis is not a
crime,” Karrie Schaaf told Truthout. “I struggle trying to understand how a
concrete cage has been my son’s reality since March 1, 2019.”
Victoria LawVictoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the
intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She is the author of
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and regularly
covers prison issues for Truthout and other outlets. Her latest book, Prison By
Any Other Name, co-written with Maya Schenwar, critically examines proposed
“alternatives” to incarceration and explores creative and far-reaching
solutions to truly end mass incarceration.
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