Episode Details

The American Bar Association, the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules), and the Association for the Prevention of Torture all recommend a minimum of one hour outdoors daily, weather permitting, as part of minimum humane standards for detention and incarceration.

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This is a 2nd podcast about the IPU (inpatient unit) at Corrigan Mental Health Center.  There are many other things going on at Corrigan MHC besides the IPU.  For example, there is a great program for helping families in which there is a young person who may be experiences the early stages of psychosis.  The people there are excellent. This podcast is only about the IPU.

In brief, the IPU itself is a valuable entity for the community.  If you did not consider the taxpayer perspective, there would be little to find fault with.  Once, however, you do consider the taxpayer perspective, you start to see Corrigan IPU in a very different light.  On the surface, it looks like a place to treat people who are a danger to themselves or others, albeit one that is substantially overstaffed.  From the taxpayer perspective, however, we look at the underlying reality: where is the cash going?  Who is receiving the cash?

And the answer is that from this perspective, Corrigan IPU is a benefit program where labor-market subsidies are suppled to a group of white, middle-class professionals.  For a population of at most 15 or 16 patients at a time, we have a staff of 30? 40? middle-class white professionals  working for whom Corrigan IPU provides employment safe from labor market presures.  The IPU may also effectively provide a private IPU for the patients of providers working there. 

I wanted to get some data or records to confirm or deny my understanding.  I wanted to know how did we end up with such a small unit with so many professionals working there?  So I first tried to make a public records request.  The folklore was that it was a patient suicide which caused the dramatic downsizing (but not the elimination) of the unit.  I wanted to find out when that suicide had occurred. The public records request put me in touch with a very nice young person who referred me then to the Director of Communications (DOC).  They may have the data I need at their fingertips.  I expanded my request and sent it to the DOC.  

That was mid January. By early February, I had received nothing back. Not even an acknowledgement of receipt of the email. So on Feb. 3, I left two voicemails and re-sent the original email.  As of February 7, today, still I have received nothing.

This was my experience also when I wrote the Human Rights Director originally to ask how Corrigan IPU justified its practically minimal provision of outside air and outside light to patients. (Effectively, on information and belief, only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the patients there receive daily outdoor air and light.  None are provided with individual access to the outdoors).  When I wrote the HRD, I received nothing, zip back.

There are laws and then there is what happens. My guess would be that DMH employees face incentives which make it inadvisable for them to reply to non-fluff inquiries.  It seems like it will only lead to frustration to keep communicating with the DOC.  So all I do, below, is provide the email chain with DMH.

1. At first, I was simply interested in trying to verify the folklore, viz., that the unit's bed count was cut dramatically following a patient suicide.  I wanted to know the date of that sui