From The Marshall Report:
A new lawsuit alleges mental health care at one of the highest security — and most violent — prisons in the country is so paltry that five-minute therapy sessions take place in the shower and suicidal inmates are given crossword puzzles.
The class-action suit filed Friday takes aim at the Special Management Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg, where most men are locked down in small solitary cells for nearly 24 hours a day. Inmates are often doubled up in the cells, which psychologists say can be even more harmful than single-celled solitary confinement.
The SMU unit holds some of the federal system’s most disruptive prisoners. A 2016 investigation by The Marshall Project and National Public Radio found that housing two volatile people together in the same solitary cell has fomented violence: The prison has an assault rate six times higher than federal prisons overall. Prisoners who resisted “double-celling” have been put into hard metal restraints until they complied.
The lawsuit was filed against the Bureau of Prisons by the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and the law firm of Latham & Watkins. Continue reading >>>
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