FROM MY FILES FRIDAY: I have two letters framed in my office written to me by world famous authors. There’s a short note from Graham Greene who I contacted after I wrote my first book, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring.  I asked Greene if he would write me a letter of introduction to his former boss and friend, Kim Philby, who had defected to the Soviet Union and was one of Britian’s most notorious traitors. Greene and Philby had worked in British intelligence together. Greene politely declined but offered to read my spy book. The other letter is from William Styron who read my book, Circumstantial Evidence, and sent me a kind and thoughtful note about justice and race in the Deep South. I’d met Styron at a Virginia writer’s conference and exchanged other notes with him before his death. Oddly, none was   about mental illness, even though I had an autographed copy of his book Darkness Visible.  In the blog that I am reprinting today, I explain how I sought out Norman Mailer early in my career.

NORMAN MAILER, PRISONS AND ME, orginially posted April 21, 2010

I first read, In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Abbott when I was spending a year as a reporter inside a maximum security penitentiary doing research for my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leaven worth Prison. If you are not familiar with the Beast book or Abbott’s story, here’s a brief review.

The son of an Irish-American solider and Chinese prostitute, Abbott had spent nearly all of his life in jails and prisons. In 1977, he learned that Normal Mailer was writing a book about Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner to be executed in 1977 after our nation re-started the death penalty ending its short constitutional hiatus.

Mailer’s book about Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song, won the Pulitzer Prize and helped revive his career.

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From My Files Friday: Four years ago, I posted this blog about the first time that I went inside a prison in the early 1970s and saw inmates with mental illnesses. Sadly, the number of prisoners will mental disorders has skyrocketed since then and what I observed in Oklahoma nearly four decades ago remains an all too familiar sight.  

The Public Cared More About A Trapped Cat Than Ill Inmates, March 14, 2010

The first time I went into a prison as a reporter was in the early 1970s when I worked at the now closed Tulsa Tribune.  The city editor, Windsor Ridenour, sent me to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester to cover a pardon and parole board meeting.

I suspect Windsor wanted me to see a tougher slice of life from what I had experienced as the son of a minister, but I doubt he had any idea how that trip would ultimately impact my life. My visit into the white knuckle hell that is McAlester ultimately caused me to write The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, which recounts a year that I spent inside a maximum security penitentiary.

It was in McAlester that I first saw how inmates with mental illness were being warehoused. Prison doctors shot them with Thorazine that reduced them to drooling zombies who rarely left their bunks.

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I’ve intentionally held off from writing about the verdict delivered in the killing of Kelly Thomas because I wanted to think about what the jurors’ decision means.

Thomas was a thirty-seven year old homeless man diagnosed with schizophrenia who lived on the streets of Fullerton, California.  The police approached him after a business owner  complained that someone in the area was vandalizing parked cars.  The police claimed Thomas resisted when they tried to search him.  At that point, they called for backup and decided to cuff him.

Part of the reason why this tragedy has outraged mental health advocates is because much of what happened was captured on video. You can hear the officer’s exchange with Thomas.

“Now you see my fists?” Fullerton police officer Manny Ramos asks Thomas while slipping on a pair of latex gloves.

“Yeah, what about them?” Thomas responds.

“They are getting ready to f*** you up,” said Ramos.

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I like to post original material and not simply pass along a story that I’ve read, but sometimes you read something that you believe would be valuable to share and this nicely written account published in the Health and Science section of The Washington Post meets that criteria.

Mental illness, suicide, depression were in my family.

But they didn’t have to be in me.

By Kate Woodsome, Published: February 3rd The Washington Post

My mother is mentally ill. My 15-year-old cousin committed suicide. Many of my relatives struggle with depression, although few use the word.

By all accounts, I should be mentally ill, right? It’s inherited — or contagious — isn’t it?

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Much of the keynote speech that I gave over the weekend at the opening session of the South Carolina Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Charleston focused on how 3,500 inmates in that’s state’s prisons are being abused, neglected and mistreated.  My comments were sparked by a judge’s recent ruling in a horrific class action lawsuit.

“The evidence… has proved that inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, “ Circuit Court Judge Michael Baxley wrote in a ruling released in January, “and hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental de-compensation, and profound, permanent mental illness.”

The judge found that mental health care in South Carolina prisons is so  “inherently flawed and systemically deficient in all major areas” that it violates the prisoners’ fundamental constitutional rights.  The judge called the lawsuit the most troubling of the 70,000 cases that he has adjudicated in the past 14 years.

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