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In county jails, guards use pepper spray and stun guns to subdue people in mental crisis
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of NPR
Posted: January 16th, 2023
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/02/1137208...
When police arrived on the scene, they found Ishmail Thompson standing naked outside a hotel. After they arrested him, a mental health specialist at the county jail said Thompson should be sent to the hospital for psychiatric care. However ... a doctor cleared Thompson to return to jail. With that decision, he went from being a mental health patient to a Dauphin County Prison inmate. Thompson soon would be locked in a physical struggle with corrections officers – one of 5,144 such "use of force" incidents that occurred in 2021 inside Pennsylvania county jails. An investigation by WITF and NPR looked at 456 of those incidents from 25 county jails in Pennsylvania. Nearly 1 in 3 "use of force" incidents involved a person who was having a mental health crisis or who had a known mental illness. Guards used aggressive – and distressing – weapons like stun guns and pepper spray to control and subdue such prisoners, despite the fact that their severe psychiatric conditions meant they may have been unable to follow orders – or even understand what was going on. For Ishmail Thompson, this played out within hours of returning to jail from the hospital. An officer covered Thompson's head with a hood and put him in a restraint chair. Thompson died. The district attorney declined to bring charges. "The vast majority of people who are engaged in self-harm are not going to die," [Attorney Alan] Mills says. "What they really need is intervention to de-escalate the situation, whereas use of force escalates the situation."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.
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