[Ppnews] Suicide City By Sara Olson

[Political Prisoner News]

Suicide City
By Sara Olson

Right after 4:30 p.m. count on Halloween, there was the sound of a 
scuffle in D Hall. An alarm brought guards running from all parts of 
the yard. An ambulance pulled up to the back door of the hall in 
which we live. The attendant pulled open the back door, got back into 
the ambulance and backed the rear of the vehicle up to the door. Next 
thing we knew, a phalanx of guards came hot-footing down our hall 
toward the ambulance, three of them surrounding a tall, slim woman 
with her wrists cuffed behind her back, hair flying everywhere and a 
wild, terrified look in her eyes. She'd threatened to cut her wrists.

Later, we were locked down at 7:00 p.m. for the rest of the night. 
Even though several industrious inmates had worked hard to put on a 
Halloween party for the housing unit, with homemade decorations and 
cleverly-designed games and snacks, the guards squelched the fun and 
locked us down. They had to do "paperwork" on the cutter. Both are 
becoming more and more common, lock-downs and suicides. If it's the 
weekend---lock-down. If it's a holiday---lock-down. People are locked 
down and they become even more depressed, over and above the general 
pall produced by simply doing prison time. Bam! Another suicide 
attempt . . . or worse, a success!

It's suicide city at Central California Women's Facility (CCWF). One 
prisoner said to me, "I've never seen so many people trying to kill 
themselves as I have in the last year. Sure, people die of natural 
causes . . . well, 'natural' prison causes like years of poor diet, 
no medical care, ever-present tension, but this suicide stuff!" As 
one of my roommates said, "It's a madhouse."

The warden was compelled by the rising rate of suicide attempts to 
issue a memorandum in August. In it, she assured the overcrowded, 
crammed-in-for-life masses that she is, "committed to insuring that 
you all have access to any level of mental health services you might 
need to address any mental health issues you may be experiencing." 
Huh? More like, each attempt is a crazed reaction to emotional 
isolation in the midst of teeming predation. It is in prison that a 
human being comes to know that she really is, no matter what 
spiritual myths she may embrace to get her through each day, all 
alone in the universe.

Recently the CCCMS program was reevaluated. There are increasing 
numbers of CCCMS women in prison or it sure seems that way. CCCMS is 
pronounced Triple C-M-S. It means Correctional Clinical Case 
Management System. It is a designation for prisoners who are 
prescribed psychotropic drugs for behavioral management. CCCMS is 
enshrined in Title XV, the California Department of Corrections and 
Rehabilitation (CDCR) bible of rules and regulations, that spells out 
the direct supervision of California's more than 173,000 prisoners in 
its prison industry. They may have been taking prescribed drugs on 
the street. Sometimes an inmate is given a medication to lower the 
incidence of anger and violence stemming from previous life 
experiences of abuse, whether personal, systemic, or both. Sometimes 
an inmate is medicated because of the way we are housed, woefully 
overcrowded, in dorm rooms, day rooms and the gym. Sacramento 
instructed mental health professionals to reduce the number of women 
prisoners at CCWF on behavior modification drugs because there are 
too many using them. "Get rid of the Topomax and Wellbutrin!" Often, 
pills are "cheeked" at the "hot med" window and sold . . .that is, 
bartered . . . for tobacco and food. Those pills were money in the 
bank--"were" because many women have already been precipitously 
de-scheduled from their meds.

Part of the reason to control the medication rolls was the plan to 
merge 600 women prisoners into the state's three women's prisons from 
California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) which, until Spring 2007, had 
been a co-ed facility. A few went to Community Correctional 
Facilities but most were sent to "ugly beds" (halls, gym, floors) at 
California Institute for Women (CIW), Valley State Prison for Women 
(VSPW) and CCWF.

The impact of the CRC transfers had a dire impact on medical care. 
The prison industry's health care is in federal receivership, no 
longer under supervision of CDCR. The receiver, Dr. Robert Sillen, 
got an email from a colleague, dated May 24, 2007:

". . . I got a call form (sic) Dawn Martin at VSPW this am and they 
are being overwhelmed with the influx of inmates and custody has 
closed down some of the off site transportation which is now causing 
a delay in care. She stated that they were at 200% of capacity and 
that there were inmates on the floors. She does not know how she is 
going to deliver care to these inmates."

This is the result of prison transport chaos on medical care. The 
mental health care that our warden assures us will be provided is 
similarly impacted. Sillen, in his supplemental Report Re 
Overcrowding in Spring 2007 wrote that CRC had 299 CCCMS inmates who 
would add to already-inflated CCCMS numbers at the other women's 
prisons. He stated:

"Each of these receiving prisons is already overcrowded with CCCMS 
patients. As of May 25, 2007, for example, (i) CCWF was operating at 
132% of its CCCMS capacity, its Reception Center was operating at 
145% of its CCCMS capacity and its administrative Segregation Unit 
housed 24 CCCMS patients;(ii) CIW was operating at 101% of its CCCMS 
capacity, its Reception Center was operating at 75% capacity, its 
Administrative Segregation Unit housed 89 CCCMS; and, (iii) VSPW was 
operating at 154% of its CCCMS capacity, its Reception Center was 
operating at 129% of its CCCMS capacity, its Administrative 
Segregation Unit held 15 CCCMS inmates and its Security Housing Unit 
housed another 32. In light of the existing overcrowding at these 
facilities, the influx of still more prisoners to these facilities 
may strain the system to the breaking point."

The "hot med line", which operates at breakfast and at the evening 
meal and where prisoners pick up their psychotropic drugs, grew to an 
insupportable number last summer. The line took two-and-a-half hours 
to process. Of course not all "hot med" prisoners were getting 
psychotropics. Some get pain-killers and there is a large number of 
diabetics who get insulin that's now being dispensed in their housing 
unit. But a large part of the "hot med line" did get them and 
something had to be done.

Prison psychologists have a huge caseload that they can't handle with 
any efficiency. There isn't time for proper evaluation on A yard, the 
receiving yard, of incoming inmates mental health conditions. Some 
scam the system. "Oh yeah, I was on such and such on the street. 
Yup!" All this prescribing of head meds got out of hand, so 
Sacramento stepped in.

 From now on, lifers will be a non-priority. They're not going 
anywhere anyway. More and more women, no matter what their needs, 
will be pulled off meds and taken off CCCMS status. Many now get 
drugs such as lithium that they consider less effective and which can 
have undesirable side effects. One reason lifer and long-termer needs 
can be degraded is that these inmates have acclimated and they don't 
appear to cry out for help. However, taking people off CCCMS without 
a real diagnosis could lead to emotional explosions. One prisoner 
remarked, "I think they would want to cause explosions. I scares the 
outsiders. If a higher safety risk can be created in women's prisons, 
Sacramento can show that women are as violent as men."

CCWF and VSPW, our sister prison sited across the county road, 
together the largest mass of imprisoned women in one place in the 
world, were built per a dorm housing plan because women aren't 
considered dangerous to staff and to each other. Originally the two 
prisons were designed for four women per room but that was in the 
last century. I was transported to CCWF in 2002. Since I've been 
here, there have always been eight women in every room. A couple of 
years ago, we wrote letters to legislators to beat back an attempt to 
cram another woman in for a total of nine per room.

CIW, built in the 1950's with its two-person cells, is spoken of at 
CCWF in the hushed tones one uses to describe some kind of prison 
heaven. "Wow! Two! Only two people to a cell!" On the other hand, 
CIW's dayrooms have been housing women in bunks since the 1980's so, 
as common space, they've been off limits for a couple of decades.

With eight people in a room, women tend to achieve a natural ethnic 
balance. It makes it more difficult to cultivate the racially-based 
antagonisms that the "old CDC" (prior to the addition of 
Rehabilitation to the departments name and the U.S. Supreme Court 
ruling against racial separation in California's prisons) has done so 
successfully among the state's male prisoners.

However, as with the men, the ethos of violence, AKA "handling your 
business," permeates women's prisons. If a woman tries to kill 
herself, she'd better do a good job because, even if she has one, 
DNR's are not routinely honored. Also, if a woman fails at her 
suicide attempt, she may get jumped for her ineptitude because she 
didn't "handle her business" well.

There is no transfer from a room for a woman who feels or who is 
actually threatened until the inmate has tried, at least once, to 
"handle her business." It's all a bizarre situation. In the end, a 
transfer to another room with seven different women is no guarantee 
of safety anyway. Eight women living over and under each other in a 
small room, many for life, leads to patterns of behavior that would 
challenge brain surgeons or rocket scientists or ordinary Americans 
who never give a thought to how they'd manage to survive such an 
environment. We're all dumped together. There's no regard for an 
individual's social or cultural history. Background other than crime 
history, is wiped out. Previous medical or mental health history, all 
of it, counts for nothing. The most deranged person runs the room 
because she terrorizes the others. She may be genuinely crazy or a 
run-or-the-mill bully. Short-termers can be subject to the whims of 
people who don't have release dates. Lifers, who must face a parole 
board that grants no release dates, must deal with a short-term nut 
who threatens to beat everyone up for a spoonful of Folger's coffee.

Cruelty and disdain are the way, ladled out by staff and inmates 
alike. Fights occur in broad daylight, resulting in fifteen guards 
descending on two women with cans of Orange Crush pepper spray drawn 
like six-guns. Perhaps a fight might be completely ignored if staff 
don't feel like doing "paperwork". Women walk around sporting black 
eyes like merit badges.

Write-ups abound, on the other hand, often for minor infractions. 
Short-termers get longer short terms and long-timers . . . oh, well . 
. . stay longer and longer, perhaps with a dollop of extra time in Ad 
Seg which can end up seeming like a vacation from the pandemonium of 
dorm housing. In Ad Seg, cells house only two people, a real plus. A 
prison thrives on chaos, moment-to-moment instability, and imminent 
threat. The rule is "never get comfortable." The minute you do, 
everything changes. The atmosphere of eternal conflict prevents all 
solidarity among prisoners and keeps everyone fearful of and fighting 
with one another. It makes it easy for the staff to play people off 
against each other. Add mental illness to the list of ingredients and 
there's a perfect combat stew bubbling away twenty-four/seven.

###

Nov 11, 2007
Sara Olson, W94197; 506-10-04 Low; CCWF, P.O. Box 1508, Chowchilla CA 
93610-1508
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