Treating prisoners’ PTSD will change lives and save lives
When I was 21, I killed someone. What I did was wrong, and at the time I couldn’t explain why I was capable of such hate and extreme violence. So I remained silent, not because I was being “tough,” but because it seemed immoral to point my finger at other people.
I had heard that the victim sold child porn, saw red and decided that he deserved to be robbed and to die. That is what I proposed to my brother when, one day, he came to me with a plan to rob a bank. We were poor college students at the time.
Why did learning that my victim may have sold child porn leave me feeling as if I had no choice but to take his life? Neither I nor my attorneys — the only people I’d told the truth to — thought to ask that question. But it haunted me for years. I didn’t think of myself as the kind of person who could kill someone, at least not an “innocent” person.
Eventually, my uncle told me that I had. been molested. That was hard for me to hear, yet it matched with disturbing visions that I sometimes had, visions that I came to realize were, in fact, memories.
Years later, while festering in solitary confinement, I contacted my stepfather and asked him about my uncle’s claim. He then told me that his friend raped me as a child. I was shocked and infuriated, but I started to understand why I was capable of homicidal fury toward a suspected child porn distributor.
I was diagnosed with PTSD before I came to prison. For that reason, I was deemed temporarily incompetent to stand trial and spent a month in a mental hospital.
PTSD is prevalent among prisoners. One large-sample 2014 study found that 30% to 60% of incarcerated men had it — 10 times as many as in the general male population. And prison conditions can cause and exacerbate PTSD: For example, prisoners who witness violence, even if they did not participate, show post-traumatic symptoms.
However, when I sought help for my aggravated PTSD, prison psychologists enlisted an outside psychiatrist who diagnosed me as psychopathic and thus recommended an end to any interpersonal therapy because I was incorrigibly manipulative. I was one of many prisoners in my unit who were labeled as such when we pressed for help with PTSD.
I am not alone. The Wisconsin Resource Center offers the only trauma program for incarcerated people in my state that I am aware of, with a limited number of beds available to Wisconsin’s more than 20,000 prisoners.
During a brief stint in another prison, a different psychologist finally diagnosed me with PTSD (a necessary step even though I’d already been diagnosed on the outside), and apologized for the misdiagnosis. She too had experienced childhood sexual abuse and called the misdiagnosis “secondary wounding.”
When I returned to the supermax in October 2018, I was stabbed in my head, face, arm and knee. I was told that I died twice before surgical repairs were finished. After the assault, with 32 staples holding my scalp together, I was transferred to another prison’s segregation unit, where I was again kept in solitary confinement. My repeated requests for help with my greatly worsened PTSD symptoms were denied and my grievances were dismissed.
Had my traumatic experiences as a child been treated, I believe that I would not have killed a man, that I would have been helped by a professional, come to terms with my own abuse and not taken my rage out on a possibly innocent person.
While it won’t bring that person back to life, treating PTSD among prisoners could help to relieve our misery and prevent crimes such as the one I committed. And because PTSD is correlated with rearrests after prisoners are released, some suggest intervention could help to reduce recidivism.
But for such treatment to happen, the public will need to stop seeing people in prisons as monsters. Everyone — perhaps especially those of us who committed grave wrongdoing — should have access to treatment.