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| Confinement of Mentally Ill Prisoners Addressed |
| By onlinesentinel.com |
| Published: 04/05/2010 |
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The House will take up discussion today of a bill intended to limit solitary confinement of prisoners with serious mental illness. The bill has been whittled down from its original form. The original bill, sponsored by Rep. James Schatz, D-Blue Hill, would have eliminated certain types of restraint and limited to 45 days the time anybody could stay in the most restrictive units of the Maine State Prison in Warren -- except in cases where an inmate had committed a serious prison violation. Schatz plans to introduce an amendment today that would bar inmates with specific mental health diagnoses from so-called special management units for longer than a week. "Keeping prisoners with serious mental illness in solitary confinement poses safety and human rights concerns," said Alysia Melnick, of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, which has been working with Schatz on the bill. "It is known to exacerbate extreme mental illness, cause extreme pain and suffering, and may cause permanent physical and psychological damage." Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson criticized an earlier version of the bill for having too broad a definition of mental illness. Melnick said the new amendment to the bill uses a definition of mental illness lifted from a 1995 federal court case, Madrid v. Gomez, in which the Ninth District Court found that holding mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California was a violation of their constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Read More. |
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