The Abuse Of Mentally Ill Prisoners Held In Close Supervision Centres - By John Bowden

Prison doctors, psychiatrists and
psychologists are currently complicit in the abuse and psychological
torture of mentally ill prisoners held in a brutal jail control-unit at
Woodhill Prison in Milton Keynes.
In 1998 the then labour government
introduced the so-called Close Supervision Centres (CSC) as a method of
punishing and controlling “difficult” and “unmanageable” prisoners, and
explicitly defined both the purpose of the CSC and the type of prisoners
it was created to hold. The CSC was designed as an overt weapon of
punishment based behaviour modification against
prisoners motivated to cause unrest and disruption in mainstream
prison regimes; essentially the type of prisoners targeted were
“subversives” and violent troublemakers. It was never openly said that
within this group of control-problem prisoners earmarked for the CSC would
be included prisoners suffering with mental illness or
suicide tendencies. Never was it admitted that within a control unit
characterised by endemic staff violence and brutality would mentally
disturbed and damaged prisoners be subjected to the same degree of abuse
and ill-treatment. Yet in August of this year Claire Hodson, operational
manager of the CSC at Woodhill Prison, openly stated that a significant
number of the prisoners held in the CSC suffered with what she described
as a “mental disorder”. Information provided by prisoners within the
Woodhill CSC describes such mentally damaged prisoners being driven beyond
the limits of psychological endurance by a regime characterised by
solitary confinement, sensory
deprivation and brutality. The involvement of prison hired doctors and
psychiatrists in either mitigating the increased mental trauma and damage
caused to such prisoners by the CSC regime or vetting out completely such
mentally ill and vulnerable prisoners from the CSC appears minimal or
non-existent, which amounts to obvious collusion in the ill-treatment of
such prisoners.

Historically of course the collusion
and collaboration of the prison doctors, psychiatrists and
psychologists in the ill-treatment and repression of prisoners has a long
and infamous tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s compliant prison employed
psychiatrists frequently and unlawfully assisted prison
staff to control and subdue “unmanageable” prisoners by
forcefully and unlawfully administering psychotropic drugs in a
practice that became known as the “liquid cosh”. Jail
psychiatrists also provided their authority to medicate the
resistance of rebellious prisoners by facilitating their removal to
high-security mental hospitals such as Broadmoor and Rampton in a
form of punishment that was known as “Nutting off”. During the 1980s the
removal of “difficult” prisoners to jail psychiatric units such as the
notorious “F.2.” unit at Parkhurst
Maximum-Security jail represented the ultimate punishment for those
prisoners too “unmanageable” to be handled in ordinary prison
segregation units; few prisoners emerged from places like “F.2.” seriously
undamaged psychologically or punch-drunk from the constant “sedation” of
mind-destroying drugs administered by completely amoral prison hired
psychiatrists. In the totalitarian society of
prison such psychiatrists freed from any accountability or legal
sanction align themselves completely with the institutional interests of
prison regimes and often gladly participated in the institutional abuse of
prisoners.

Punishing mentally ill prisoners for
behaviour associated with their illness is both morally reprehensible and
a unarguable abuse of basic human rights, and all those involved in
administering the regime in the CSCs under which mentally ill
prisoners are effectively being tortured should be held legally
accountable.

During the 1980s a then Tory government
with a ruthless antipathy towards state financed and administered
health care closed most of the large psychiatric hospitals and caste it's
inmates and patients effectively onto the streets under the
heading and illusion of “care in the community”. Many of those patients
then found their way into the prison system, somewhere
hopelessly ill-equipped and disinclined to deal with them in a
medically appropriate and therapeutic way. Some of that same group,
because of their more “confrontational behaviour” towards prison
authority, as defined and interpreted by guards trained only in how to
control and lock people up, will find their way into punishment orientated
prison segregation-units where further and more deeper
brutalisation will take place and greater damage inflicted. Those who
respond to that with a more resilient streak of resistance or
“inappropriate behaviour” will at some point find themselves
consigned to a CSC, where the prison system will really go to work on
their minds and spirits. Self-mutilation will then usually manifest
itself, and within the Woodhill jail CSC levels of self-harm are
disproportionately high (earlier this year a mentally ill prisoner in the
Woodhill CSC completely severed both his ears whilst in the
showers and in possession of a razor blade), something it's
operational manager Claire Hodson knowledgeably describes as a
“coping mechanism or as a maladaptive coping strategy, as well as
diagnosis of one or more personality disorders”. And yet she is
responsible for enforcing a regime deliberately intended to inflict the
worst possiblepsychological damage upon this particular category of
“difficult”
prisoners.

The
psychological torture and abuse of the mentally ill anywherein society is
a crime and the CSCs are therefore responsible for
operating regimes that are intrinsically unlawful and should be
closed and shut down.

In 1984 a
prisoner, Michael Williams, instigated a high profile legal action against
the prison system and Home Office, one supported by the then National
Council for Civil Liberties, that challenged the lawfulness of the
Wakefield Prison “Special Control Unit” on the grounds
that it's regime breached the basic human rights of the prisoners
held there. Although his legal action failed it raised the public
profile of the Control Unit experiment (originally used on suspected Irish
Republican combatants and outlawed by the European Court of
Human Rights) and Wakefield closed the control unit. The regime
operating in the CSCs, especially in terms of it's treatment of
mentally ill prisoners, needs to be similarly challenged and exposed, and
the behaviour of those trying to legitimize the abuse inherent in that
regime and paid to oversee it held fully and publicly
accountable.

John Bowden
HMP Shotts
30/9/2011