AdSeg Has To Go

We Can't Wait for the US Supreme Court to do the Inevitable --
          Rule Solitary Confinement Cruel & Unusual Punishment

We want inmates with "mental illness" in CO Jails who are slated for AdSeg 
          Sent to One of CO's Mental Health Institutes for evaluation & treatment

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US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
"Over 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky wrote, 'The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.'  . . . There is truth to this in our own time."

              ------US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, concurring opinion in Davis v.  Ayala (June 18, 2015)
 
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/19/1394538/-Justice-Kennedy-s-remarkable-opinion-on-solitary-confinement?detail=email


We have submitted this idea to the State and solicited their ideas and opinions.  We have not yet heard back.


When we do we will post to the website.
          After the Christopher Lopez case (person died in adminstrative segregation while in Dept. of Corrections custody), CDOC got rid of solitary confinement for people with mental illness.  Unfortunately, it is alive and well in Colorado jails.  And while most jails have procedures as to when it should be used, etc. ---- Those procedures sometimes aren’t followed. 

What goes on is pretty horrific. 

We’d like to see inmates with mental illness the jail has determined should be placed in administrative segregation—transferred to one of the mental health institutes. 

This is for a number of reasons: 

  1. AdSeg is routinely overused & misused – one of the men we worked with when all was said & done was put in AdSeg because he would not sign a release & the reality was he had no objection to signing the release once he understood it (none of that is grounds to put someone in AdSeg)  -- All of this took lots of time & effort & work with the County Attorney & others—most people don’t have the ability to do that.
  2.  Nobody may want to hear it but people get abused in AdSeg for all kinds of reasons – they “look like a fag,” the officers just don’t like them for some reason, etc.
  3.  AdSeg amounts to torture & people are held there for months.
  4. The Mental Health Institutes could serve as a check on this and help these individuals get the care they need.