Note 2.0

  Prisons employ thousands of psychologists supposedly to assist prisoners with their problems. However, psychologists themselves report that their rehabilitative influence within prison settings is severely limited.

  In the twenty years I've spent working in the psychology department of a large state prison, my experience has been that psychologists are not in the business of rehabilitating prisoners or even running programs to rehabilitate prisoners. They are there to support the administration and some of their absurd rules. In short, they are the people who specialize in greasing the squeeky wheels composed mostly of the mentally ill who have been thrown in prison in record numbers since state hospitals have closed down across the country. Prison counselors and administrators don't know how to deal with these people so they make it the job of psychologists and psychiatrists to keep them under control. However, the number of such mentally ill prisoners has grown so large that they have become unmanagable. Prison is an extremely negative environment that acerbates psychotic symptoms. The scale of the problem prison psychologists face in keeping these people under control is unmanagable to those in private practice in the community.

  To complicate matters further for prison administrators, prison gangs often use paranoid schizophrenics as self destructing torpedos against members of rival gangs. They feed the mentally ill inmates paranoia by telling him that a member of a rival gang is going to kill him and that he had better take the fellow out first. They would be glad to provide him a weapon, often a sharpened piece of metal to complete the task.

  Prison administrators have responded by utilizing psychiatrists to dish out massive doses of expensive anti-psychotic medications. The cost became exorbitant, so prison administration began tracking and publishing the number of prescription medications each psychiatrist dished out. They then applied severe political pressure on the psychiatrists who were top prescribers lowering their evaluations in in some cases firing them if they refused to lower the amount of anti-psychotic medication being prescribed to the inmate population. Their philosophy was that a man could be psychotic all he wanted as long as he didn't cause problems for administration. This proved to be a very tough balancing act and the number of disruptions caused by mentally ill inmates increased putting pressure on security to deal with mentally ill inmates. Having no training in such matters, mentally ill inmates were punished for being mentally ill by being transferred to higher custody units. If they caused problems there, they were transferred to even higher custody units. In short they were being punished for being mentally ill. The highest custody units were heavily populated by the mentally ill and were a hell to work. Staff turnover was horrendous.

  I distinctly remember dealing with one case of a paranoid schizophrenic whose voices were telling him to kill another inmate. I have his and his victim's name documented somewhere in my records. I sent the psychotic inmate to the medical unit three times requesting that he be given an anti-psychotic medication before he hurt someone. Three times he was sent back by the administrative lacky working the medical unit with orders to keep the amount of medications utilized to a minimum with an assessment that the inmate was faking hearing voices and was merely a personality disorder. Two weeks after the third time I had sent him to medical and he was sent back with nothing, he stabbed another inmate thirteen times. I was furious, so angry that I stayed out of work three days. The prisoners chart was well documented to the effect that the inmate was psychotic and dangerous, not only by myself, but by a psychiatric nurse who was working the same unit.

  Administration became paranoid that the family of the victim might find out what had happened. After close to 18 years working in the prison, for the first time in my career after this incident, the chief psychologist assigned an administrative lacky to review every note I put into a medical chart to make sure I didn't put administration in such a prediciment ever again. I was put under a microscope. I found their behavior dispicable. From my 20 years of experience and what I have seen going on around me working in different prisons, psychologists working for the prison system for the most part are not rehabilitave, but system agents that keep the cogs in a very dysfunctional system from hanging up. They spend the most time working with inmates who have the potential to disrupt the system. Many newer social service types taking their first jobs in prisons come in like I did, thinking they can do something to reform the system. Sooner or later they find out the hard way that the system does not want to be reformed. It is a form of self perpetutating insanity that resists change like a malignant cancer that keeps growing until it kills its host organism. Since prison systems aren't transparent, society as a whole ignores them with an "out of sight, out of mind attitude." However, the increasing crime rate and a steady, significant rise in their taxes telegraph that something is bad wrong, yet the symptoms are ignored.

  A recent national survey of prison psychologists in 1998 by the University of Alabama surveyed 822 prison psychologists. The results were as follows: Psychologists reported spending the greatest amount of their time performing administrative duties and secondly providing therapy. Most therapy is provided in an individual format. This is one of the lowest volume, most time consuming and expensive of any of the conventional treatment formats. It does very little good to talk to a prisoner with an understanding ear for a few minutes then throw him back into the shark tank, sometimes for the rest of his life.
Depression and anger were cited as the most frequently treated problems among prisoners. Respondents reported very little time (1%) spent on research. The result is that knowledge about viable treatment and program options within correctional settings has been severely impeded and limited. Although many correctional psychologists indicated a desire to be more involved with research activities they reported a lack of time and support for such endeavors. Most psychologists reported that their facilities were understaffed with respect to mental health professionals. As a result, their time was often highly committed to crisis intervention situations and direct treatment. They perceived a lack of time for additional activities. As a result, little time is directed toward research and consultation with security and staff. (National Survey of Correctional Psychologists, J. Boothby and C. Clements 1998, University of Alabama)