Day or night, the lights inside cell 135C of central New Mexico’s Valencia County Detention Center were always on.
Locked inside, alone, for a total of eight months, Jan Green says she heard the constant drip of water from a broken showerhead, pitting the concrjjete floor where she curled up on a sleeping pad. When she was awake, Green – a 52-year-old computer technician diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – rocked back and forth on a three-foot bench, hour after hour, confiding in an imaginary companion.
“I didn’t have a calendar or a pencil. I didn’t have anything. So … I pretended I had a friend in there with me,” says Green. “I would talk and hold conversations just in my little crazy world, I guess you would say, just to keep me company.”
Though locked in solitary, Green was, in a sense, far from alone. In jails around the country, inmates with serious mental illnesses are kept isolated in small cells – some no wider than a man’s arm span – for 23 hours a day or more, often with little or no treatment or human interaction.
Lawmakers and activists in some states have worked to curb the widespread use of long-term “solitary confinement” in prisons, where research shows it can drive those with mental illnesses further over the edge. But there has been little attention to the use of isolation in the country’s 3,300 local jails, increasingly the biggest mental health treatment centers in many communities.