This story is fucked up; from the bullshit charge that got him locked up to the prosecutor merticulously staking charges to ensure he’d never get out, to the fucking guard union endorsing the opponent of a prosecutor who’d worked to right the wrongs done to the dude. Just a lot of bullshit all around and thank God this black man survived thru it all and managed to get out with some portion of his mind functioning. I hope he gets ALL the state of Illinois’ cheese.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-anthony-gay-solitary-confinement-suit-20181206-story.html
How solitary confinement drove a young inmate to the brink of insanity
Jeff Coen and Stacy St. Clair
With his mental state deteriorating as he sat in the crushing isolation of solitary confinement, a desperate inmate named Anthony Gay saw a temporary way out.
Sometimes it came in the form of a contraband razor blade. Occasionally it was a staple from a legal document or a small shard of something he had broken.
He would mutilate himself in his Illinois prison cell, slicing open his neck, forearms, legs and genitals hundreds of times over two decades in solitary confinement. Once, he packed a fan motor inside a gaping leg wound; another time he cut open his scrotum and inserted a zipper.
Each time he harmed himself, he knew that, at least for a little while, the extreme step would bring contact with other human beings. Therapists would rush to calm him. Nurses would offer kind words as they took his pulse and stitched him up.
“It’s kind of like being locked in the basement, and then emerging from the basement and being put on the center stage,” he said. “It made me feel alive.”
Gay entered the Illinois Department of Corrections in 1994 as a young man, convicted of robbery after brawling with another teen who told police that Gay took his hat and stole a single dollar bill. He expected to serve as little as three and a half years.
Instead, a fight with a fellow inmate led to Gay’s first stint in segregation, pushing him into a downward spiral that resulted in 22 years in solitary confinement. Shortly after the segregation started, the cutting and suicide attempts began.
The Illinois Department of Corrections would later identify Gay in court filings as one of a few dozen inmates whose mental illnesses were so acute and dangerous that they required full in-patient care. His psychiatric treatment, however, often consisted of a therapist shouting questions to him through a door.
A significant number of those have mental illnesses, though estimates vary. A federal judge recently found that of the roughly 1,100 Illinois prisoners in solitary confinement, more than 900 of them have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. Another measure, provided last month by the Illinois Department of Corrections, found that nearly 1 in 3 prisoners in segregation have a mental illness categorized as serious.
The issue has prompted several states to reform their segregation policies in recent years, though Illinois lags behind. While Illinois has significantly reduced the number of days juvenile offenders spend in isolation and no longer uses segregation as a punishment for young people as part of a consent decree between the department and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, those policies do not extend to the adult population. That, however, could change following a blistering report from a federal monitor charged with reviewing the treatment of mentally ill inmates in restrictive housing.
Released from prison in August, Gay said he hopes his lawsuit helps change the system, and in some ways he already has. A federal judge ordered the Illinois Department of Corrections in October to improve its mental health services — a groundbreaking ruling made after Gay testified about his troubling treatment in solitary.
With Gay’s intelligence and an extraordinary ability to articulate his mental deterioration in solitary confinement, his lawyers believe he could be a pivotal voice in the growing prison reform movement.
“I’m more focused on loving the guys that’s still left behind,” Gay told the Tribune, “and throwing a rope to pull them out of the ditch.”
A rough beginning
Gay’s early family life in his native Rock Island wasn’t always steady.
He was raised in a working class neighborhood by an aunt and uncle who adopted him, although his biological mother, who had endured struggles of her own, lived in the same Quad Cities town along the Mississippi River. He sat at the dining room table of his aunt’s home on a recent day, surrounded by family pictures, and recalled how as he was entering his teen years he made the fateful choice to leave.
His maternal aunt’s home meant stiff rules, homework and curfews, while his mother’s two-room apartment meant freedom to come and go as he pleased.
“If I had stayed here, I don’t think I would’ve gotten into trouble,” he said. “Went downhill when I left here.”
Gay said he had difficulties with discipline when he wasn’t wrestling for his school team, at one point being sent to a juvenile home.
Recent proposals to limit solitary confinement for adult inmates in Illinois died without even making it out of the General Assembly. More than 30 states — including Texas, California, North Dakota and New York — have taken steps toward reducing the number of inmates held in segregated cells for punitive reasons. And Colorado, once notorious for holding inmates in solitary confinement, now has a policy that bans solitary confinement for longer than 15 days and requires most inmates must be out of their cells for at least four hours a day.
Both the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the American Corrections Association have championed reforms, acknowledging that such practices do not serve the best interests of inmates or staff. A 2016 joint study by the administrators association and Yale Law School concluded that segregation should be used when “absolutely necessary and for only as long as absolutely required.”
“I think there is momentum (for reform). When states both large and small start making these changes, it’s hard for other states to ignore it,” said Leann Bertsch, the ASCA immediate past president and director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Administrative segregation places substantial stress on both the staff working in those settings as well as the prisoners housed in those units. Our highest priority is to operate institutions that are safe for staff and inmates and to keep communities to which prisoners will return safe.”
A new life
Anthony Gay no longer treads anxiously or lives in isolation.
He has a home now, with friends and family. He has a half-dozen lawyers, all of whom are concerned about how he adjusts amid his newfound freedom.
“For the past year and a half I’ve been worried to death about what’s going to happen when Anthony comes out, because what the hell?, what has the state done to this person and then said, ‘All right, go forth?’ ” Main asked. “So there has to be some acknowledgement and some awareness and some reckoning to address what we, the state of Illinois, 200 years old, are in the process of doing and have done and will continue to do unless there are conversations like this.”
After his release, Gay moved in with his aging aunt and uncle, who see him as their son. His aunt often looks at him for long stretches without saying a word, just shaking her head and smiling as if she can’t believe he has come home.
Anthony Gay greets other parishioners at the Church of Peace in Rock Island on Nov. 11, 2018 which he has been attending since being released from prison. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
At his adoptive parents’ dining room table, Gay offers guests root beer and shows them where he’d been painting their kitchen. He cannot sit still for long stretches, often finding excuses — Come look at this picture of fourth-grade me in the front room! Do you want to see the handiwork I’ve done in the basement? — to stand up and walk around.
There were no baths in prison, so he prefers them to showers, he said. Over the holidays, Gay picked out many of the favorite recipes he had missed for so long, first and foremost his aunt’s caramel cake.
He has marveled at the advancement of technology, and has learned to text. Though his uncle bought him a subscription to the local newspaper while he was still in prison, there’s still a lot he has to catch up on.
He does get therapy, and he shrugs when a lawyer sitting with him talked about how he might be the one to shed light on a dark part of the Illinois prison system and help others who now find themselves where he was.
There are deep scars, both physical and emotional, but Gay insists he doesn’t hate anyone he believes did him wrong. He won’t let himself be eaten up by anger thinking about those who ignored him except when they were pushing food through a slit in a steel door.
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,” he said, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr. “Only love can drive out hate.”
He might write a long piece about his experiences, he said, and if not, he would like to get into publishing somehow.
But for now Gay marvels at the small things, like mowing a lawn, having new shoes, and taking out the garbage. Even a stroll to a small coffee shop in his old hometown is something to be savored.
“The other day, I walked down to the corner, and I just stopped and was like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” he said.
“I’m here.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-anthony-gay-solitary-confinement-suit-20181206-story.html
How solitary confinement drove a young inmate to the brink of insanity
Jeff Coen and Stacy St. Clair
With his mental state deteriorating as he sat in the crushing isolation of solitary confinement, a desperate inmate named Anthony Gay saw a temporary way out.
Sometimes it came in the form of a contraband razor blade. Occasionally it was a staple from a legal document or a small shard of something he had broken.
He would mutilate himself in his Illinois prison cell, slicing open his neck, forearms, legs and genitals hundreds of times over two decades in solitary confinement. Once, he packed a fan motor inside a gaping leg wound; another time he cut open his scrotum and inserted a zipper.
Each time he harmed himself, he knew that, at least for a little while, the extreme step would bring contact with other human beings. Therapists would rush to calm him. Nurses would offer kind words as they took his pulse and stitched him up.
“It’s kind of like being locked in the basement, and then emerging from the basement and being put on the center stage,” he said. “It made me feel alive.”
Gay entered the Illinois Department of Corrections in 1994 as a young man, convicted of robbery after brawling with another teen who told police that Gay took his hat and stole a single dollar bill. He expected to serve as little as three and a half years.
Instead, a fight with a fellow inmate led to Gay’s first stint in segregation, pushing him into a downward spiral that resulted in 22 years in solitary confinement. Shortly after the segregation started, the cutting and suicide attempts began.
The Illinois Department of Corrections would later identify Gay in court filings as one of a few dozen inmates whose mental illnesses were so acute and dangerous that they required full in-patient care. His psychiatric treatment, however, often consisted of a therapist shouting questions to him through a door.
A significant number of those have mental illnesses, though estimates vary. A federal judge recently found that of the roughly 1,100 Illinois prisoners in solitary confinement, more than 900 of them have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. Another measure, provided last month by the Illinois Department of Corrections, found that nearly 1 in 3 prisoners in segregation have a mental illness categorized as serious.
The issue has prompted several states to reform their segregation policies in recent years, though Illinois lags behind. While Illinois has significantly reduced the number of days juvenile offenders spend in isolation and no longer uses segregation as a punishment for young people as part of a consent decree between the department and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, those policies do not extend to the adult population. That, however, could change following a blistering report from a federal monitor charged with reviewing the treatment of mentally ill inmates in restrictive housing.
Released from prison in August, Gay said he hopes his lawsuit helps change the system, and in some ways he already has. A federal judge ordered the Illinois Department of Corrections in October to improve its mental health services — a groundbreaking ruling made after Gay testified about his troubling treatment in solitary.
With Gay’s intelligence and an extraordinary ability to articulate his mental deterioration in solitary confinement, his lawyers believe he could be a pivotal voice in the growing prison reform movement.
“I’m more focused on loving the guys that’s still left behind,” Gay told the Tribune, “and throwing a rope to pull them out of the ditch.”
A rough beginning
Gay’s early family life in his native Rock Island wasn’t always steady.
He was raised in a working class neighborhood by an aunt and uncle who adopted him, although his biological mother, who had endured struggles of her own, lived in the same Quad Cities town along the Mississippi River. He sat at the dining room table of his aunt’s home on a recent day, surrounded by family pictures, and recalled how as he was entering his teen years he made the fateful choice to leave.
His maternal aunt’s home meant stiff rules, homework and curfews, while his mother’s two-room apartment meant freedom to come and go as he pleased.
“If I had stayed here, I don’t think I would’ve gotten into trouble,” he said. “Went downhill when I left here.”
Gay said he had difficulties with discipline when he wasn’t wrestling for his school team, at one point being sent to a juvenile home.
Recent proposals to limit solitary confinement for adult inmates in Illinois died without even making it out of the General Assembly. More than 30 states — including Texas, California, North Dakota and New York — have taken steps toward reducing the number of inmates held in segregated cells for punitive reasons. And Colorado, once notorious for holding inmates in solitary confinement, now has a policy that bans solitary confinement for longer than 15 days and requires most inmates must be out of their cells for at least four hours a day.
Both the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the American Corrections Association have championed reforms, acknowledging that such practices do not serve the best interests of inmates or staff. A 2016 joint study by the administrators association and Yale Law School concluded that segregation should be used when “absolutely necessary and for only as long as absolutely required.”
“I think there is momentum (for reform). When states both large and small start making these changes, it’s hard for other states to ignore it,” said Leann Bertsch, the ASCA immediate past president and director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Administrative segregation places substantial stress on both the staff working in those settings as well as the prisoners housed in those units. Our highest priority is to operate institutions that are safe for staff and inmates and to keep communities to which prisoners will return safe.”
A new life
Anthony Gay no longer treads anxiously or lives in isolation.
He has a home now, with friends and family. He has a half-dozen lawyers, all of whom are concerned about how he adjusts amid his newfound freedom.
“For the past year and a half I’ve been worried to death about what’s going to happen when Anthony comes out, because what the hell?, what has the state done to this person and then said, ‘All right, go forth?’ ” Main asked. “So there has to be some acknowledgement and some awareness and some reckoning to address what we, the state of Illinois, 200 years old, are in the process of doing and have done and will continue to do unless there are conversations like this.”
After his release, Gay moved in with his aging aunt and uncle, who see him as their son. His aunt often looks at him for long stretches without saying a word, just shaking her head and smiling as if she can’t believe he has come home.
Anthony Gay greets other parishioners at the Church of Peace in Rock Island on Nov. 11, 2018 which he has been attending since being released from prison. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
At his adoptive parents’ dining room table, Gay offers guests root beer and shows them where he’d been painting their kitchen. He cannot sit still for long stretches, often finding excuses — Come look at this picture of fourth-grade me in the front room! Do you want to see the handiwork I’ve done in the basement? — to stand up and walk around.
There were no baths in prison, so he prefers them to showers, he said. Over the holidays, Gay picked out many of the favorite recipes he had missed for so long, first and foremost his aunt’s caramel cake.
He has marveled at the advancement of technology, and has learned to text. Though his uncle bought him a subscription to the local newspaper while he was still in prison, there’s still a lot he has to catch up on.
He does get therapy, and he shrugs when a lawyer sitting with him talked about how he might be the one to shed light on a dark part of the Illinois prison system and help others who now find themselves where he was.
There are deep scars, both physical and emotional, but Gay insists he doesn’t hate anyone he believes did him wrong. He won’t let himself be eaten up by anger thinking about those who ignored him except when they were pushing food through a slit in a steel door.
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,” he said, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr. “Only love can drive out hate.”
He might write a long piece about his experiences, he said, and if not, he would like to get into publishing somehow.
But for now Gay marvels at the small things, like mowing a lawn, having new shoes, and taking out the garbage. Even a stroll to a small coffee shop in his old hometown is something to be savored.
“The other day, I walked down to the corner, and I just stopped and was like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” he said.
“I’m here.”
