AND THIS IS WHAT THEY COME UP WITH?!?

The Supreme Court decided it was a violation of the 8th amendment to not offer psychological treatment to prisoners with mental illness, and rightly so. Here you see California DOP’s brilliant answer…therapy cages.

Aside from reminding me of the first few pages of Discipline & Punish, how a design so similar to the iron maiden can get passed anyone, let alone the therapists working in these environments is beyond me. How may we put someone with a serious mental disorder in this confining metal apparatus and expect them to feel as though they can express thoughts, feel free in the mind for a brief time, to find some sort of comfort/release in themselves or do the introspective work that comes along with treatment?  I’d love to see the evidence supporting isolation from human interaction, extreme confinement as healing. I’m aware they are both prisoners and patients but when speaking of treatment, you must put one before the other…you can see which one is at the forefront here.

Jeffrey Metzner, a Colorado psychiatrist (and a noted “advocate” of prisoners with mental illness and former chair of the APA Committee on Judicial Action) who has advised the court-appointed special master overseeing mental healthcare in California prisons, said the enclosures offer better security and more freedom of movement than alternatives (…).

This alternative, Dr. Metzner?

Metzner also advised prison officials to refer to the enclosures as therapeutic modules, not cages. “The name is important, because if you call them cages, people inside might feel like animals and respond accordingly,” he said.

So what do you call a prison? What if we called it Hawaii? Would the prisoners feel like hula dancers? I don’t even know where to begin with that statement, it’s so full of wrong. Bottom line: how is this not cruel and unusual?