Welcome to Hell Psychiatric Incarceration — A Clockwork Potato

Welcome to Hell
Psychiatric Incarceration — A Clockwork Potato

"… so he had a lobotomy. Now he’s well again." —Repo Man

I am on a mental health cellblock in a Connecticut maximum security prison. It’s not much, but I call it home.

I am going to try not to comment as to whether I think this is the answer to Connecticut’s mental health/ crime strategy. I don’t ask questions. I write simple columns and an occasional poem to my fiancée. Such sticky political things are best left to the George Wills and Robert Renos of the writing nation.

What I will discuss is what it’s like in here—all medicated-up and as serene as a June canoe trip. I will also write about what life is like under the care of the state as a mental health criminal—in short, how medication mixes with incarceration—and how I "glide," sort of, through it all.

I weighed myself this afternoon: 225—not bad, for a 40-year-old at 6’-1". Not bad considering sometimes I have the energy of a boulder at rest in the desert and the firmness of a 1970s beanbag chair.

The latter is my own fault. The state provides these cellblocks with a Universal weight machine and exercise classes in our very own gymnasium. I just can’t seem to conjure up the energy to break my own inertia. It’s my state of gliding serenity that’s preventing me—and I couldn’t care less. When I first got here, I worked out, barely slept, and got into fistfights and arguments with just about everyone. Now, medicated, none of the above is true.

I am not "out of it" (I can still push a noun against a verb to blow something up), and I’ve been in psychiatric care facilities before where I have been "out of it"—so I am cognizant of the difference.

Here in this prison, the psychiatric care is good—if good means resulting in "existing peacefully" while not being "out of it." The psychiatric care is also good when you look at who the state has as "clients" (everyone from mass murderers to wife beaters, with psychiatric issues that have to be treated under the watchful eye of the Department of Corrections).

My crime was robbery. I’m a drunk with some mental health issues—primarily bipolar disorder. Bipolar people tend to self-medicate and calm down using liquor. Unfortunately, liquor skews judgment, as does bipolar disorder. The combination is very dangerous. So here I am … and here I’ll be for the next several years. But it could have been worse; it could have been much worse.

So (and this reads like a tired elephant joke): "What do you do with a criminal with psychiatric issues?" Answer: Put him in a psychiatric wing of a correctional facility. (That’s not the answer to "What do you do with all people with psychiatric issues?" Don’t jail them—that's ludicrous!)

But back to the Clockwork Potato, back to the 225-pound, gliding beanbag chair … if I come across as if I’m happy about all of this, I apologize. I could bore you with a list of what is "not nice" about state correctional facilities, but I won’t. I’ll just say this: The rumor that prison is unpleasant is indeed a fact, I’m here to tell you.

My situation is unique in that I need psychiatric care. And while prison may be archaic or Draconian, Connecticut has done a good job in addressing its prison population’s mental health issues. So instead of suffering two ills (incarceration and mental illness) I only have to deal with one—the one to which I was sentenced.

But the state needs to start watching who it jails and why. We’re heading into sticky areas: the state can also start scooping up the mentally retarded, or people who try to bite their own ear while walking down the street, etc. "Breach of peace" is an indefensible charge, and a powerful police tool. We need to be aware.

D. P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.