Tom Clements, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, is keynote speaker at the Mental Health of America of Colorado awards luncheon Jan. 20, 2012.
His speech was in response to the recent report on Colorado prison use of solitary confinement and treatment of mentally ill or disabled people, available at the website of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition's website: ccjrc.org.
Senator Morgan Carroll's SB176 in the 2011 Legislative Session called for a study of the overuse of solitary confinement in Colorado's prisons, and an evaluation of treatment of the mentally ill in prisons. At that time, the report was that Colorado's prison population had grown from 15 percent mentally ill to 37 percent.
Fortunately, the legislature took some action since the report and last August took steps to reduce Colorado's overuse of solitary confinement, causing 37 percent to be released into regular populations of inmates.
Other questions remain: How many of the mentally ill in Colorado's prisons are actually mentally DISABLED, as in by a traumatic brain injury? Who are the individuals determining the proper diagnosis for inmates, and how are they evaluating inmates for criteria indicating their "mental illness" is actually a brain injury and mental disability?
Why do female populations of inmates experience a much higher rate of mental illness?
How many of the mentally disabled people in Colorado's prisons are actually people who made a claim for a brain injury in Colorado's Worker's Compensation system, but who were fraudulently denied their benefits and sent to prison to erase the employers' costs and further silence the aggrieved injured worker?
Think that can't happen? Talk to Paula, who suffered that injustice in Colorado's corrupt worker's compensation system. Don't tell me about it.
And why has the legislature appropriated extra money to treat sex offenders while ignoring the needed treatment for inmates with brain injuries? What if the public doesn 't want those sex offenders out by virtue of some cockamamy experiment? What if the mentally ill female inmates got there in the first place by the sexual abuse perpetrated on them? So why shouldn't the resources be put to the mentally disabled first?
Enjoy.