Following the years since my incarceration, I’ve witnessed the inmate prison population alter dramatically, becoming more and more defined by those with severe emotionally handicaps and mental illnesses.

It makes me wonder if our society, being at a loss for better alternative solutions for the special care needs of the mentally challenged, has allowed prison to become a psychiatric ward by default.

If so, it has consigned the sensitive treatment needs for thousands of psychiatrically challenged prisoners to an agency not designed for or prepared for the care of the mentally ill.

The consequence of which is a Pandora’s box, waiting to unleash devastation onto the social conscience of society, who must bear the shock waves from crimes committed by those with a wounded psyché once released.

The public’s insensitivities to the mentally ill then threatens to become the Achilles heel of social order, returning back to us the investment of our negligence as the karma of poetic justice.

The prison system only serves to accommodate this end, being the means by which many of the treatment concerns of the mentally afflicted are either ignored or worsened.

Prison’s culture of incompetence, is incapable of making the subtle distinctions between behavioral mal–adjustment stemming from chemical imbalances and those premeditated as conscious acts of rebellion against agency policy; a distinction necessarily critical to determine when treatment as opposed to punishment should be applied.

But oftentimes those inmates who are mentally challenged are punished indiscriminately without regard for the mental conditions to which they are helplessly afflicted.

But why should this shock us now, for it is not agency policy for corrections shaped by public opinion and consensus?...

Thus, making such examples of indifference but a statement that reflects the sentiments of the public conscience!

Hence, we are all indirectly responsible for this continued treatment of the mentally ill members of our communities that are behind bars.

Mr. Ozmit, a maverick in his own right, who has sought to challenge the bull of stubborn political tradition in prison reform in South Carolina, cannot be expected to bear the blunt of blame for a fatal public policy that willingly consigns, without a conscience, the mentally ill members of its society to a captivity defined by punishment.

As a society who champions human rights to the world and celebrates every virtue of civilization, it becomes our moral responsibility to reject the doctrine of hypocrisy and turn a more sympathetic eye to the plight of those with a challenged intellect, deteriorating within our state’s prison system without a voice or an advocate.

My personal desire is to see a fiscal spending agenda that allocates more for expenditures sensitive to the psychiatric concerns of those incarcerated.

Only then, I believe, can the agency’s director be duly empowered to pursue program initiatives and environment creation that provides the emotional resources suitable for those with mental health needs.

The public conscience on this issue then, should be shaped around our collective vested interest in preventive and effective psychiatric treatment capable of helping to stem the tide of recidivism.

We should therefore seek to lobby through our local representatives for “need specific” increases being made to the fiscal budget for correction’s spending, aimed at the mentally challenged, seeing it as not only a moral imperative, but also as a tangible investment to the safety of society’s social integrity.

In doing so our actions will set a precedent in perfect alignment with our social values, that refuses to assign to the humanity of others a station of debasement or a life consigned to degradation.

The mentally infirmed within our prison systems are in dire need of our understanding, not our neglect, and in our sight should be seen as those more deserving of a life of freedom than one consigned to punishment and captivity without due moral deliberation.

Ezekiel Thomas

SCDC Inmate