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Is Solitary Confinement Cruel?

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      Is being confined indefinitely in  a solitary prison cell “cruel and unusual punishment” and does it violate a prisoner’s right to due process?

    A team of students at the University of Denver Strum School of Law and two of their professors claim the answer to both questions is yes. In 2007,  they filed a civil rights lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on behalf of a familiar name: Thomas Silverstein.

Silverstein sent me this drawing after I mailed him one of my books. Several BOP officers were angry that I gave him a copy but didn't offer them one.

     Silverstein is a major character in my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, and someone I have known since 1987. That’s when I became the first and – to date — the only reporter ever allowed to interview him in prison.

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Psychiatric Advance Directives Make Sense!

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If you have read my book, this blog, or heard me speak, then you know that the first time my son, Mike, became psychotic, I raced him to a hospital emergency room seeking help. Mike was delusional, but he didn’t believe anything was wrong with him, and he was convinced that all “pills were poison” so he refused treatment. The emergency room doctor told me that he could not intervene until Mike became an “imminent danger” either to himself or others. That was the law. Mike had a right to be “crazy.”  Forty-eight hours later, Mike was arrested after he broke into an unoccupied house to take a bubble bath.
The second time Mike became psychotic, I waited until he became dangerous and what happened?
Our local mobile crisis team refused to come help me, the police were called, and Mike was shot with a Taser.
As a father, those two situations frustrated and enraged me.
What I didn’t know at the time was there was an alternative that could have helped Mike and possibly  prevented what had happened to us. 
It’s called a Psychiatric Advance Directive and this week, I received a wonderful email from my state National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter telling me about how PADs, as they are known, are becoming more common in my home state of Virginia.
A PAD is a legal document that is filled-out by a person with a mental illness while he/she is  well. (One of the biggest myths about persons with mental disorders is that they are always psychotic and, therefore, incapable of rational thought.)
PADs are generally divided into two sections.

Norman Mailer, Prisons and Me

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I first read, In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Abbott when I was spending a year as a reporter inside a maximum security penitentiary doing research for my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leaven worth Prison. If you are not familiar with the Beast book or Abbott’s story, here’s a brief review. 
The son of an Irish-American solider and Chinese prostitute, Abbott had spent nearly all of his life in jails and prisons. In 1977, he learned that Normal Mailer was writing a book about Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner to be executed in 1977 after our nation re-started the death penalty ending its short constitutional hiatus.
Mailer’s book about Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song, won the Pulitzer Prize and helped revive his career.

What Books Have Influenced You?

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Think of a book that had an impact on you.
When I was about fifteen, I read Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham and I was mesmerized. At the time, I was living in a town of a 1,000 residents in western Colorado where my father was a minister. My older sister, Alice,  had died in an automobile accident and I was struggling to make sense of that age old question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
I don’t remember now how I got my hands on Of Human Bondage or why I started reading it, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down.

Death and Insanity, a Final View

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Much of the information for this blog was taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal which can be read by clicking on the highlighted newspaper link.
I have been writing this week about persons with mental illnesses who have committed murders and how our legal system, the victims, and society deal with these crimes.
This blog is the final one in this week’s series and I want to share it with you because it presents yet another perspective on death and insanity.
Like Wednesday’s blog, today’s is about someone whom I admire. Joe Bruce and I met when I was giving a speech in Maine. You might have seen him on television because his family’s case has received a lot of attention.
Joe and his wife, Amy, lived in Caratunk, a picturesque town of about 110 residents nestled in the state’s northern hills.  Joe is a rugged, friendly man, who worked as a senior technician for the Maine Department of Transportation before retiring several years ago. Amy, served as the town’s treasurer. Their son, William – known as Willy – is the oldest of three boys. The family lived in a 100-year-old farmhouse that sits near the banks of a winding, rock-strewn stream.
To outsiders, their lives may have seemed picturesque, but something was wrong with Willy.

A Different View of Executing the ‘Insane’

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Nick and Amanda Wilcox’s daughter, Laura, was nineteen, beautiful and talented. She was a sophomore at Haverford College, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, and in the midst of a campaign for the student body presidency when she came home for Christmas Break in 2000.

Laura had worked during the summer as a receptionist at the Behavior Health Department in her hometown of Nevada City, California, which lies between  Sacramento and Reno. When her boss called and asked if she could fill-in for a few days over the holiday season, she immediately agreed.

Her mother, Amanda, would describe her daughter to me this way when we first met last summer.

“Laura had extraordinary capabilities, kindness and spirit. She was an outstanding student, graduating as high school valedictorian and was attending a highly regarded college. She was extremely organized, disciplined and motivated; she had boundless energy. She lived life fully as she danced through her days, easily juggling academics, service work, clubs and student council, piano, ballet, and exercise. Laura touched and inspired everyone she met, she had a big circle of close friends; her teachers adored her. My daughter was beautiful, but her inner beauty was even greater. Her strong sense of compassion, respect, justice, and truth were beyond her years. All of that changed when she crossed paths with Scott Thorpe.”

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