One woman hung herself, and died at MCI Framingham last weekend. Two more tried to hang themselves. There is only one prison in Massachusetts for all female prisoners – whether for drug use or murder.
60% of the inmates at MCI Framingham suffer from diagnosed mental illness. There are no hospital beds for them because so many beds were closed.
The real problem, says Joel Pentlarge of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, originated with the closing of state hospitals that used to serve the mentally ill.
“We’re using our prisons to a large extent to institutionalize our most seriously mentally ill people,” he said.”And prisons don’t do a good job of treating the mentally ill.”
But, Walker notes, “The DOC didn’t ask to be the state’s mental hospital, but it is.”
For the rest of the MetroWest News Article
More than four mental health positions have been cut at MCI Framingham. The prison, which was built to accommodate 452, but on the day Inmate Christina Morando, 22, of Swampscott, hanged herself with a bedsheet Sunday night MCI Framingham held 593 women.
This is not a new problem. Here is an article about a woman born in MCI Prison to an inmate, who also hung herself there. From inmate’s daughter to suicide at the same prison
Earlier this month I visited a client who is held at MCI Framingham; I represent her in a Care and Protection Case. My client was imprisoned for a violation of her parole without a hearing [this is how it is done] and as a result, the state took her 10 year old daughter. The bright lining in this case is that the father held joint custody, and the daughter is with him.
My client had a large raw area on her face. She explained that a major growth of malignant melanoma was removed; she had complained about a weeping sore and it took four months to see a doctor by which time about 25% of the skin of her face needed to be removed. She wants my help to be able to call her daughter from prison; as well as with medical care, which is rationed quite heavily to all appearances. What caused her sentence to activate was a “dirty screen”.
She also has a history of suicidal depression and a life story full of tragedy, including the death due to a heart attack of the first husband who she so loved, and who rescued her from an abusive home, by a heart attack when she was 19. It was after his death, a story I have verified, that she turned to substances to numb her pain.
Her life story is so depressing with such heinous events I cannot write about it here. Does she need therapy? Well, yes. And medical care? Well yes. And a chance, I hope, with some hard work, to at least stay in touch with her daughter.
Cutting 4.5 mental health positions at MCI Framingham won’t help this client of mine, and just might be part of why 22 year old Christina Morando was found hanging fron a bedsheet, dead last week.
I wish I could say, “Together we did better.”
After my most recent visit to MCI Framingham and the most recent news which sounds so much like 2006, I cannot say we are doing better by these sad, almost forgotten, vulnerable mentally ill women.
Amber – this is where the rubber truly meets the road. This is a heinous story, and I am appalled that this progressive state is going “Texas” on human services. It’s about priorities, and clearly, the women’s prison isn’t high enough on the list to make the cut. Someone tell me again how this guy is any different from the string of Republican governors that we’ve had? Hires friends and supporters…millions for movie studios. Yeah, good times.
so many of our Mental hospitals (3 within 10 miles of my house alone) and let thousands of disturbed people walk the streets. We need these hospitals opened again and populated with the sick people walking the streets. I’ll pay some extra taxes for this.
I too would pay taxes to get these sick people off the streets, into hospitals, and treated.
It was a perfect storm of well-intended liberal progressives with a “let my people go” mentality…meeting up with the conservative privatizers. The end result is a busted system with no oversight.
says Joel Pentlarge of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, originated with the closing of state hospitals that used to serve the mentally ill.
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p>Might that be a reference to the closing of Northampton, Metropolitan State, and Danvers State Hospitals in the early 1990s? This was then Governor Weld’s big contribution to the abdication of government’s responsibility to care for the most vulnerable members of society. He closed at least nine major institutions in Massachusetts, including those three facilities for persons with mental illness, three facilities for persons with mental retardation and three public health hospitals.
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p>Now, our prisons are filled with people who are mentally ill, many of them suicidal and our community-based care system is stretched to the breaking point. As far as the Patrick administration is concerned, this apparently represents progress. I guess these people in prison now have their personal dignity–they are no longer in a state mental institution.
This issue is directly linked to the fact that in the US and in Mass. We The People and our elected representatives allow healthcare to be treated as a market-driven commodity rather than as an essential public good and human right. When and how will we ever fix this? The “landmark” Mass. law mandating the purchase of private insurance mandate essentially did the opposite of establishing healthcare as a human right. Now it looks like we’re on the way to repeating that mistake on the national level; the “public plan, if it exists at all, will be little more than in name only unless a seachange occurs.
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p>Improved Medicare-for-All is the gold standard policy solution that puts people before profits.
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p>As a nurse who has specialized training in mental illness and substance abuse issues, I wanted to help provide good care to the women at Framingham MCI but after going through the 10-day orientation and training at the Prison many years ago I found the quality of health care conditions so sub-standard that I could not be a part of it.
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p>I won’t go into the details but it was bad. Very bad. (one nurse was responsible to admin. meds to 150 inmates and you couldn’t even talk to them, just push the pills across a counter and then the guard would do the “mouth check”.
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p>This was back in the early 1990’s and that state had already contracted out most prison healthcare services to a private, I recall for-profit, company. The week after my training I was deciding whether to take the permanent position and then the Globe reported a story about an inmate at MCI who that week was found dead in her cell, hanging from a tied sheet. The story reported that she’d been on antidepressants and that other inmates had voiced concerns that the meds weren’t helping and she was voicing suicidal plans…but nothing was done.
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p>Healthcare for people, not for profits!
Almost identical to what you describe from the early 90s. The healthcare is, if anything, apparently even worse than what you could not stomach.
See: http://www.boston.com/news/loc…
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p>This dead inmate also had a history of suicide threats, mental health treatment, and is dead without having an official death sentence.