Photo by Tulsa World newspaper
FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: I was in my early 20s, the first time I visited a prison and saw how inmates with mental illnesses were being treated. I wrote an expose for The Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune, that sadly has since closed. In this blog first posted in May 2010, I recalled the reaction my expose received with the response that came after I wrote a story about an abandoned cat. The contrast is a reminder of how important it is for us to demand compassion for those who are ill.
Prisons, Cats, and an Oilman: Where Is Our Compassion For Others?
I have never forgotten my first trip into the white knuckle hell of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary (Big Mac) in McAlester, Oklahoma, and how it changed my life. More than a decade later, I would write The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, which recounts a year that I spent off-and-on inside a federal maximum security penitentiary describing everyday events. I have visited dozens or jails and prisons since then and am always shocked when I see how little has changed in many of these facilities when it comes to housing the mentally ill, the fastest growing segment of our prison populations.
During the mid-1970s, psychotic inmates in McAlester were shot with heavy doses of Thorazine that turned them into drooling zombies who rarely left their bunks. Many slept 23 hours per day in a drugged out trance.
I was so outraged I wrote an expose for the Tribune that I hoped would prompt reforms. It was greeted by silence. There was no community uproar, no letters to the editors, not a single reaction from an elected official.
Shortly after my series was published, a cat crawled through a hole into a warm spot seeking shelter. What the cat didn’t realize was that it had taken refuge inside a hollow portion of a state landmark called The Golden Driller.
