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EDITORIAL Mentally ill should not be housed in prison

Portsmouth Herald (NH) - 4/14/2016

Another reason why we must change our attitude toward those suffering from mental illness has come to light.

For decades, the state of New Hampshire has run a Secure Psychiatric Unit at its prison in Concord, essentially jailing mentally ill patients there who have never committed a crime.

Sent to the prison’s SPU are those found not guilty of crimes on the basis of insanity; those too fragile to be in the general population at the state’s New Hampshire Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric services; and the civilly committed who have not been convicted of a crime. The state is making inmates of the innocent, and it’s perfectly legal under state law.

The SPU is on the prison’s grounds in a separate building with its own entrances, but it’s no place for the people we’re sending there.

Between 2012 and 2015, N.H. Hospital transferred 51 patients to the SPU, which is not an accredited hospital and is governed by its own statutes that fall within the state prison statutes. The hospital has been sending patients to the SPU since the mid-1980s.

State Department of Corrections spokesman Jeffrey Lyons noted the SPU is referred to as a "mental health treatment facility" and provides the same level of care as N.H. Hospital, only it is more secure. That maybe the case, but the patients are still living as if they are inside a prison.

A nurse for the past 35 years, Beatrice Coulter of Concord worked at the SPU for just four days before she had to quit because she couldn’t go along with the way things operate there. She contends the SPU is run like a prison. She feels so strongly that she’s joined forces with Wanda Duryea of Farmington, who has experience with family members living with mental illness and now advocates for basic rights and justice for the mentally ill.

"When I found out they were putting mentally ill people in prisons without charges, I just about flipped," Duryea said. She and Coulter have created Advocates for Ethical Mental Health Treatment to raise awareness of the state’s practice of sending mentally ill patients to the prison’s SPU.

The group has garnered the support of Rep. Renny Cushing, D-Hampton, who introduced HB 1541 to bar the state from sending civilly committed patients with no criminal record to the SPU and would require patients too dangerous for the state hospital to be placed in another facility, outside the state if necessary.

It’s a sad statement that in all these years our state hasn’t created a place to care for mentally ill patients in this situation and thinks it’s OK to basically put them in prison when they have committed no crime. It’s an even sadder statement that we, representatives and residents alike, have allowed this to happen for decades with no demand for change. The saddest statement of all is about our attitude toward our neighbors suffering from mental illness. We’ve essentially said they do not have the same rights as the rest of us just because they are ill. Even if they are violent and a danger to others, they are ill, not criminals.

Recommendations to change the SPU practice were made in 2005 and 2010, but their track record of being ignored by the Legislature doesn’t bode well for Cushing’s bill. It’s time to write our representatives, to write letters to the editor, to call radio stations in a show of support for the mentally ill in general, but also to express outrage about this specific injustice. We support HB 1541 and call on legislators to support it, not ignore it. Our society’s understanding and support of the mentally ill and of equal rights for all its victims has expanded vastly and our state needs to reflect that in all its practices, especially in creating proper facilities that should have been built years ago.