HOW TO CREATE M A D N E S S IN PRISON
by Solitary Watch Guest Author
Guest Post by Terry A. Kupers, M.D., M.S.P.
Editors’ note: Dr.
Terry Kupers is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. A psychiatrist
with a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, forensics, and social and community psychiatry, he teaches at the Wright
Institute, a graduate school of psychology in Berkeley, California, while also maintaining a private practice and serving
as a consultant to mental health centers and social rehabilitation programs in the community.
Dr. Kupers has studied and worked with prisoners in solitary confinement, and describes mentally ill
inmates confined in segregated housing units as “the most severely psychotic people I have seen in more than 25 years
of practice.” He has testified in several large class action litigations concerning jail and prison conditions, sexual
abuse, and the quality of mental health services inside correctional facilities, and served as a consultant to Human Rights
Watch, Amnesty International, and Stop Prisoner Rape. His books include Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars
and What We Must Do About It.
The piece below is an excerpt from a longer article that
appeared in the book Humane Prisons, edited by David Jones (Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006). In the full article, available
online here, Dr. Kupers describes in detail each of the ingredients in his “recipe for creating madness in our prisons”–which
is in fact also a recipe for creating an explosion in long-term solitary confinement.
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It’s worth pausing
for a moment to consider how we created as much madness as exists today in our prisons. Perhaps, after exploring how we arrived
at this dreadful state of affairs, we can strive to reverse the process and foster sanity, at the same time developing humane
and effective prisons. READ ON:
