If you’re not already hardened to prison life no doubt those first few days locked-up
are going to be a daunting experience.
Any number of prisoners who’ve turned over a new leaf and talked about their experience
on the inside will tell you it’s probably better when you get to prison to keep your
head down.
In certain places in the U.S., prisoners have talked about how they first had to show their
papers, meaning the document that explains what crime or crimes someone has committed.
Other ex-convicts have talked about how you might have to join a gang, even if you don’t
want to, while you’ll hear a lot of toughened former prisoners saying if you don’t want
to get bullied then stand up for yourself.
You might lose the fight, but at least someone will think twice about bullying you in the
future.
That said, there are some extremely violent and unhinged people in the prison system.
If you get on the wrong side of these people it’s just plain bad luck.
You might not even have to do anything wrong; someone could be so unstable the infraction
you committed is in their mind only.
They might simply be crazy.
Imagine the nightmare of sharing a cell with someone who’s done some horrible things
to people and he’s not exactly friendly towards you.
You fear what might happen when you are asleep; if you say the wrong word; if you breach one
of rules he has laid down for what he calls his cell.
And then there’s the prison yard.
In a recent interview one former prisoner and leading gang member said the yard can
be a tricky place to navigate.
His advice was don’t go out there looking too happy or too sad.
Don’t be too animated he said, because there are likely a lot of people who will read something
into that animation.
Have you suddenly come into money?
Do you have illegal substances?
Are you laughing at them!?
Talking about them?
He added that where he was in California some guys on that yard might be wired and paranoid
because they’ve been binging on illegal substances.
He advised people to keep a blank expression, but his primary advice was just stay out of
prison because it is generally a terrible place to be.
The numbers differ, but it’s stated by various human rights groups that the number of mentally
ill people in U.S. prisons is disproportionate to the number of mentally unwell people on
the outside.
The Treatment for Advocacy Center wrote in 2016 that in the USA 20% of people in jails
and 15% of people in state prisons had a serious mental illness.
Go back a few years and Human Rights Watch said that one in six prisoners were mentally
ill.
That same article said, “Many of them suffer from serious illnesses such as schizophrenia,
bipolar disorder, and major depression.”
That is not say though that these are the people who tend to hurt others, far from it.
Human Rights Watch wrote that mentally ill people can be victimized and exploited by
others, and they are often punished by staff for making a lot of noise, or not following
orders, and even hurting themselves.
Because of that these mentally ill people might be isolated from others, and this could
really push them over the edge.
Being left locked down and isolated could lead to acute psychosis or a depression whose
depths are unfathomable.
That report took two years to write and involved interviews with hundreds of inmates, prison
staff, mental health workers and attorneys, and while it’s a bit dated now, the neglect
of mentally ill prisoners is still discussed today and is still a big issue.
The report told us that around 70,000 inmates in U.S. prisons are psychotic every single
day.
This doesn’t mean all these people are dangerous and violent.
As we said, they might just be a danger to themselves.
But as Human Rights Watch says, some prisoners do have extreme and uncontrollable mood swings,
or sometimes they hallucinate or experience troubling delusions.
Some of these people might do things like paint their cell with their own natural waste;
they might beat their head against a wall, or worse, attempt to finish their own existence.
They are often moved, sometimes because they have committed violence against others because
of their delusions.
As we said, paranoia can be fomented on the yard after prisoners have done too much time
alone with an illegal substance that might have prevented them from sleeping.
Some prisoners have been known to be perpetually unstable; too quick to lash out; and you can
find many instances when prisoners have asked for a cell change because they fear for their
life.
Of course not all psychotic people are violent and not all violent prisoners have a mental
illness.
But if your “celly” is constantly obsessed about how you are plotting against him – when
you are not – it’s a problem.
It’s also a problem when you share a cell with someone who is so explosive and unpredictable
that he causes you great harm for the smallest of transgressions, such as you snored or left
some food crumbs on the floor.
Such people exist, and no prisoners wants to share a cell with someone like that.
We should now give you some examples of when mentally ill people did some horrible things
while in the general population.
One prisoner that made headlines all over the world should very likely not have been
in the general population.
This is a British man still in prison today, but isolated because of the things he did
while locked up with other prisoners.
His name is Robert Maudsley, and he has somewhat sensationally been nicknamed the real Hannibal
the Cannibal by the British tabloid press.
He’s also the longest serving British prisoner right now.
Reports state that as a child he had suffered terrible traumas and he had tried to take
his own life a number of times.
He claimed to hear voices telling him to kill people, and then he did commit one murder
which landed him in prison.
Given his background, you might think he needed psychiatric care and perhaps the authorities
might have thought hard about how he might get along with other prisoners.
He actually did get some psychiatric care as he was first sent to the mental health
facility, Broadmoor Hospital.
There he and another prison captured a man and held him in a cell, and proceeded to torture
that man to death.
The year was 1977.
But believe it or not, it was then decided to send Maudsley to a normal prison.
He wasn’t happy about this transfer and made it known, and around a year later other
prisoners would pay for this bad move by the authorities.
On one afternoon in ’78 Maudsley invited a fellow prisoner into his cell.
He then proceeded to garrote that man and stab him to death.
After that he hid the body under his bed.
Subsequently he invited other prisoners into his cell, but they declined the invitation
for a chat.
Maudsley didn’t stop there, and went out on the wing to find another victim.
He found one.
The second victim gained the killer some amount of notoriety as he was found dead with a spoon
sticking out of his head and part of his brain missing.
In spite of what the British tabloids wrote, it’s thought he didn’t actually eat the
brain.
After that he was detained in a special glass cage cell which looked a bit like the cell
Hannibal Lecter was locked in, in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
He will stay in isolation until he dies, and has had requests to kill himself or even have
a pet bird denied.
The Guardian wrote in 2003 that he has a genius-level IQ, loves poetry and art, has a university
degree, and enjoys classical music.
Other prisoners have talked about the day he killed the two men, saying they saw madness
in his eyes and they believed he wanted seven victims in total.
The jury is still out as to if this man should have ever been among other prisoners.
Some of his victims had hurt young people, and that’s what he said happened to him
as a child.
Because of this some people will tell you he should have had more treatment for those
traumas, and not been part of the general population.
Maudsley’s relatives have said the system has only ever wanted to break him.
The man himself said this, “All I have to look forward to is further mental breakdown
and possible suicide.
In many ways, I think this is what the authorities hope for….
It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad.
They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight
and out of mind.”
Even if you think the prison system got it wrong here it probably doesn’t detract from
the fact you probably wouldn’t want to bunk with this guy.
These kinds of stories are not so uncommon, either.
In 2014 the Australian media reported that an inmate who was suffering from schizophrenia
had murdered his cellmate.
The press wrote that this man believed that other prisoners were actually aliens, and
he killed one of those aliens by strangling him with a television cable.
A psychiatrist that later talked to the prisoner said the man thought all the other inmates
were trying to kill him.
Apparently he believed that people of different nationalities actually came from different
planets.
Because of this he wasn’t convicted of murder and was sent not to another prison but to
a prison hospital.
In 2019, in the USA, a man called Jaime Osuna did something even more gruesome but he wasn’t
thought to be suffering from an acute mental illness.
In interviews he claimed to be a sadist; his face tattooed with a Joker-type smile and
satanic symbols.
He was locked up already for murder, and in interviews called killing, “an addiction,
a drug.”
Is he mentally unwell?
You could say he is, but more in the way we might refer to someone as a “psycho” than
someone who is a certified psychotic.
You wouldn’t want to be in the same cell as him, that’s for sure.
In 2019 the media reported that Osuna had killed and dismembered his cellmate in California.
He then beheaded that man.
A Kings County Assistant District Attorney said about the incident, “This is probably
the most unusual and gruesome case that I’ve had in my career.”
It’s highly unlikely Osuna will get a cellmate again, and even 20 years down the line you
wouldn’t want to be the person who shares a room with him.
But unhinged people time and again have been given cellmates.
The Guardian in the UK reported in 2006 that an extremely violent and openly very racist
man was put into a cell with a man not of his race.
This man was British-Asian and just 18 when he was killed by his cellmate.
He was only serving 90-days for a small offense and it was the first time for him in prison,
and worse, he only had to wait until the morning to be released.
That didn’t happen because his cellmate beat him to death with a table leg he had
managed to take off.
How could this happen?
The prison officials knew this man was a racist and other prisoners later said he was “strange,
weird and aggressive.”
It’s also written that he had displayed the behavior of someone mentally unwell, such
as when he ate soap, painted the walls with his own product, or started a fire.
As a teen he had slashed his own wrists, stabbed a teacher, and then was put into care and
later young offenders institutions.
One officer at such an institution wrote on a report that he was a “disaster waiting
to happen” and a mental healthcare worker wrote he had “a long-standing, deep-seated
personality disorder.”
The Guardian writes that he was also involved in another murder at a young offenders institution,
and cites a report that there was a real chance that prison guards where the murder of the
young Asian man happened played a game called Gladiator.
This, in the words of that newspaper, involved putting “unsuitable inmates together in
the same cell to generate violence.”
The judge in the case said prison officials should have known this young man with such
violent tendencies could have been capable of such a thing.
It became a huge case and a movie was later made about it.
After hearing this, do you have any thoughts on how the prison system should deal with
inmates who are mentally unstable?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Why Was This Prisoner Kept Locked Away In
Permanent TOTAL Isolation.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.