Mental Health and an End to Solitary Confinement with Mary Buser, Author of Lockdown on Rikers Island Pt. 1

Sabrina gets to talk with Mary Buser, Director of Social Workers and Allies Against Solitary Confinement, and former assistant director of mental health services at Rikers Island, the huge jail complex in New York City. She has a heart of gold, a depth of knowledge, and work experience that can teach us all SO much. While we avoid any shocking or triggering descriptions in both parts of this interview, we get a real glimpse into the reality of solitary confinement and its torturous impact on people, the challenge of bringing mental health resources and corrections into the same space, and the ways that ordinary people can be a part of positive change in prison neighborhoods everywhere.  (This is the first of a two-part series.)

TIME MARKERS:

0:50 Meet Mary Buser

7:00 Assigned to Rikers Island as a student

8:30 Wait, you want to go BACK there?

10:00 A Guest in Their House

12:30 The Final Straw 

18:00 The Baddest of the Bad…or a Minor Rules Infraction?

21:00 What Solitary Confinement ACTUALLY Does to a Person

25:45 Tom Clemens, Rick Raemisch, and Reform in CO

29:25 from Ch. 26 Lockdown on Rikers Island


Find Mary Buser at:
https://www.marybuser.com/

Find Social Workers and Allies Against Solitary Confinement at:
https://socialworkersasc.org/

Fine Lockdown on Rikers Island at:
https://www.amazon.com/Lockdown-Rikers-Shocking-Injustice-Notorious/dp/1250077842

Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
 We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
 Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
 Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript

Hello there! Sabrina here. Today’s episode is an interview with a woman who has inspired me, and taught so many so much about a subject that is difficult to study, because resource are so scarce.

You may never have heard of her, but a lot of people are listening to her wisdom and guidance as they set policy for prisons and bring best mental health practices to bear on the treatment and education opportunities in correctional facilities in the U.S. Meet Mary Buser.

She is an LCSW and author of the award-winning book, Lockdown on Rikers: Shocking Stories of Abuse and Injustice at New York’s Notorious Jail, which is based on her work as an assistant mental health chief at Rikers Island, notably in the solitary confinement unit. 

After leaving Rikers, Mary became an advocate for the incarcerated. Her op-ed “Solitary’s Mockery of Human Rights” was published in The Washington Post in 2013 and her writing has also appeared in Politico, Vice, The New York Daily News, The Daily Beast,  and Filter Magazine. 

In 2019, she testified before a congressional subcommittee in support of reforms to solitary confinement. 

She is now serving as Social Workers and Allies Against Solitary Confinement, seeks to abolish the barbaric practice of solitary confinement as it exists in our nation’s jails, prisons and detention centers. Since 2014 we have worked with allied organizations to heighten public awareness about solitary and to promote humane alternatives. In addition, we challenge the “helping professions” to address this practice, and to provide meaningful ethical guidance to their corrections-based workers. 

SWASC’s first Director is Mary Buser, who has been a central figure in this group since its inception in 2014. 

In her new role as Director, Mary will be tasked with setting the tone for SWASC, creating the organizational structure to support long-term growth, and managing the many initiatives already in place, and also working to build partnerships and boost their social media presence.

She is my guest today on The PrisonCare Podcast, and you will love her. She is person of such heart and integrity, and she also just happens to have expertise we desperately need for our education as people who care about prison neighborhoods and ALL the people who live in them.

SJ: Lockdown on Rikers Island was a book that very much changed my, I wouldn’t say, my life…maybe it didn't change my life, but pretty darn close. It changed my understanding in a really profound way. And so I just want to first of all, thank you for writing the book. I would imagine that it was a grueling process and it was written something like ten years after you left Rikers Island, is it something like that? 

MB: Yes, more or less. I worked on it for about ten years trying to get it published, trying to write it and publish it. It was something… I've never written a book before. I thought, oh maybe two years and well low and behold, no it was more like ten years. 

SJ: Wow.

MB: Yeah and at that time I was writing it no one… the big… all the attention now to the issues of mass incarceration did not exist. So I kind of felt like a lone voice out there. There was just nothing about Rikers Island or any of this. So it was very hard for me to attract attention around what was going on at Rikers Island. 

SJ: So has it gotten… has the book gotten traction since, like, since "The New Jim Crowe" book, came out in what ‘17, I think. So there's been a whole lot more attention given to mass incarceration, has that been a good thing for your book?

MB: Yes, a good thing for my book, but I think more importantly, my book opened a lot of doors, enabled me to go and speak in many different venues from the local fire house, with the Women's Club, all the way to Washington, DC before a committee… Congressional committee to the Judiciary Committee in Nevada. It really did go far and wide in enabling me to really bring outside to the world; The people, the voices, the Unseen masses inside. So yes, it was, it was, it opened many, many, many doors. And, you know, for that I'm grateful and amplified the voices and of course, joined the growing chorus of so much coming out about our jails and prisons and just, just the reality of it and how it is so far afield from what the general public believes it to be. 

SJ: It really is. It is astounding and solitary confinement, is just a whole other level of that. I mean, the last couple of years for me, since my son was arrested has been really a fast education in what it's really like inside a prison, you know, and there was just so much that… I assumed things worked a certain way and ninety percent of what I assumed was incorrect and then you begin to read and learn about solitary confinement and it's, wow! So can you give us just a quick snapshot… How did you end up working at Rikers Island? How did you end up in the role that then had you survey the folks in solitary? 

MB: Yeah, it really was not planned. When I was getting my masters in social work, you have to do two years of fieldwork and for my first year, I was placed on Rikers Island at the women's jail and unlike my fellow students, I was okay with it. Everyone was kind of freaking out about it. “Oh my God! Are we going to be safe?” But right from the beginning, I couldn't imagine we'd be sent someplace that we would not be safe. And I went in a very optimistic way, thinking, maybe there's something that I can do to help these women and get to know them and it turned out to be very much the case that these are human beings no different from the rest of us. As I got to know their stories, their backgrounds… it was so much foster care, abuse, addiction that they grew up with and it was all very kind of understandable, very human. I worked in the nursery with mothers who had just given birth. We had a, a group there, and I worked with some women who suffer from serious and persistent mental illness and I found the whole experience to be very eye-opening but also very enriching. I felt that my being there really did make a difference. That's why you go into this kind of work to make a difference, right? So after that I had more fieldwork ahead of me and different settings but when I finished with school, all I wanted to do is go back to Rikers Island. And it was at that point I got a lot of pushback from family and friends, and they said, “no one in their right mind… it's one thing to be a student and get assigned to go there, but you don't agree to go there. Get your head examined. You're going to get killed. You’re going to get aids. You’re going to be just the bottom of the barrel professionally” and I was stunned because it made perfect sense to me. It had been very fulfilling and it took me a while. I took some other jobs before I finally came around. You have to grow a little bit yourself to say, "hey, it’s my life and regardless of what you might think about this, this is what I want to do.” And that's what, that's what I did. I returned to Rikers Island. Although it started to take very different twists and turns as a as a full-time employee.

SJ: And you said this was in the mid-90s, right? When you when you came in full time? 

MB: Yeah. Okay. Yes yes mid-to-late 90s. Yes. Yes mid-90s, actually.

SJ: So give us a snapshot then of… you're there a full-time professional now. First, I just gotta ask, did you have colleagues there who like you had felt enriched, drawn to this, called to it or were people there because other things hadn't worked out for them? Like, what was your experience with the other staff?

MB: I would say it was a little of both. There was a psychologist there who hated every minute of it. And was just, you know, always worried about germs. And, and just, there's really this is all we're doing is putting Band-Aids on these people. And so he was very eager to get out and there might have been a couple of psychiatrists who were also, but I would say for the most part at least in the beginning, I was very lucky to be on a very cohesive team that cared. And it's very important to have good support in an environment where there are no happy stories. It's one terrible story after the next. So we had a good network of support of mutual concern, very good supervision, our chief of the unit was a really good. Boy, does it make a difference to have good management and a good solid team of people. So for the most part we were dedicated. Yeah.

SJ: That’s amazing. Because that's one thing that I'm finding is one of the things that PrisonCare is committed to… is seeing what the prison environment is doing to the staff there too. And the recidivism rate for prisoners is what everybody is paying attention to in the political realm but the turnover rate among staff is a huge piece of all of the problems too. And I've been reading some various survey stuff coming in that the vast majority of staff who leave corrections, it's because they didn't have good supervision. It's because they felt like they were unheard, they were unimportant. They were disrespected and it had less to do with the prison residents and had more to do with the administration. 

MB: Yes. I think that's very, very much the case and certainly as my tenure at Rikers continued and it changed; the city contracted with a different vendor and they started making changes and it really disrupted the stable teams that we had in all of the jails, and Rikers as a campus of jails. At the time, there were ten of them. So there were teams in each jail but as that all got disrupted it really did then start to change a great deal and you did not feel supported and things became very fragmented and you became disillusioned and burnout was much greater. So yeah, it’s very much a factor and I think in staff you're including correctional personnel as well. 

SJ: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So eventually the changes that took place and the lack of support and the everything led you to leave and your career has essentially been advocacy since then, is that correct?

MB: Yeah. I would say so, yeah. It was a combination of factors. It was, my employer changes with the city, the contract, just disrupting what had been good systems. There was that combined with my growing disillusionment just about the system itself. Meeting so many people who were there cuz they could not make bail and we're talking $200 in some cases, $50 might as well have been a million and it really highlighted the ways in which people who have no money are really, really in a very bad way, when it comes to the criminal justice system. It very much has to do with money and also with race. You know, I remember when I went back to Rikers… it was not at the women's jail, it was at the men's jail and you know, I remember meeting all these kids who were there for marijuana charges and they were all black and I kept scratching my head going, don't white kids also smoke pot? So you saw up close down, you know, you hear about racism and everything. It's kind of a concept out there but you see it right in front of you. It's like, “wow!” So I was growing more and more disillusioned with the system. I was growing very deeply disturbed by the levels of brutality in the jails and my inability to do much about it. You were very much a guest quote “in their house” and you are reminded of that continually and for a civilian, to make too much noise, come to protest is potentially dangerous. You know, you can get your tires slashed. You are very dependent on Correctional Personnel to move around the jail. Everything is locked. The clinic is locked, the bathrooms are locked, the vending machines are locked and they don't give you your own set of keys. So you're banging on doors and you are wholly dependent on Correctional staff. And sometimes the door just doesn't open and everyone is pleasant and polite as can be but you could wait until you've missed your bus that goes back down to the parking lot for another hour. Messages are delivered. The final straw for me was my placement in the solitary confinement unit which at that time was five hundred cells and I was the acting chief of mental health in that unit. Within two days of my arrival the chief announced she was going out for surgery and they were going to takeover and oh my god. 

SJ: Wow. 

MB: And then seeing up close what solitary confinement is and the degree of suffering that it causes just really, you know, I became more and more… It became more clear to me that I had gone from someone who was making a difference to a person who’d just become a cog in a wheel. And so it was emotional but I realized the time had come for me to leave. Yeah.

SJ: So, can you describe a little bit what solitary confinement actually involves and what it's actually like cuz it's very, very different than what most of us on the outside think? I have heard plenty of people jokingly… but only kind of jokingly say, “I wouldn't mind doing a couple of months in solitary, you know, just for some quiet and and so people leave me alone” and yeah, it’s an illusion. So can you tell us a little bit about it? 

MB: Sure, well solitary confinement first of all, goes by many names and so if you hear administrative segregation, special housing, protective custody is also solitary confinement, all of them… and they create new names all the time too. Cuz solitary confinement is an unappealing term, but it's all the same thing. So what it amounts to is spending 23 hours a day in a cell. There is minimal human contact, your food comes through a tray from a flap in the door. The cell is small. There is a lot of variation from one state or municipality to another. In some of them, the lights are never turned out, in others there might be a little window. Rikers, there were little windows. In others, it's just cement, no windows whatsoever. The length of time that someone can spend in solitary can go from a couple of days, to weeks, to months, and to decades. I've worked, been working with a man since he's been out, who spent 22 years and 36 days of sitting in a cell, if you can imagine that. 

SJ: I mean, I can’t.

MB: I mean a baby is born grows up, goes to school, high school, graduates college all in the time that this man sat and just basically rotted away inside that cell. Now, the reasons that people are put into solitary… 

SJ: That was my next question. Yeah cause, we all think, wow… ‘cause they like tried to kill a corrections officer or something, right? It's gotta be only really, really violent, bad people who get sent to solitary. 

MB: Right, right. Well, not the case, that's an exception. That's what you’re… we are led to believe that. It's for the worst of the worst and the baddest of the bad. It is typically a punitive unit. It is also known as the jail within jail, but I was very surprised when I started working in this unit, you know, expecting each person in those cells to be Hannibal Lector and discover, you know, oh, wait a minute, you're in here because you walked out of your housing unit wearing a hat. You're here because you had too many postage stamps. You had too many sheets. These are all possible rules violations. And it was astounding to me that people were placed in solitary confinement for infractions like that, that there was nothing in between. There was no reprimand or, you know, taking away some privileges… that people were simply put into solitary confinement. I found it to be about 75% of the people in there, were in there for nonviolent types of infractions. 

SJ: So were there literally no other options. I mean, was there anything on the books that would like, privileges that could be taken away or other… or is it that it was used as the only thing, when actually other things could have been tried?

MB: Yeah, other things, there was no interest in trying other things. It was just simply the default and the, and frankly, the easiest thing. Rick Raemisch, who was the former Director of Prisons in Colorado, who I know you are familiar with, testified before Congress and he said that it's an easy management tool and he said that does not make it okay, but it's much easier to maintain the correctional facilities when people are locked in their cells and it's not an excuse to do it but it’s…

SJ: It’s logical. It does make sense. 

MB: Yeah, just lock everybody in. But the consequences for it, the suffering is, is enormous.

SJ: So can you explain that? Because I think people don't understand why it’s classified as torture beyond a certain point. What is it, 15 days that the UN…

MB: The UN said 15 days. Yeah.

SJ: Why?

MB: Well I remember my very first day in this unit being walked around with the chief who was explaining that the mental health department, had a huge presence in this unit. She said, “Mary, if they had no mental health issues before they entered solitary, they do now.” And it just stayed with me her words over time because it was so true. We were constantly monitoring people for depression, for suicidal ideation, for psychosis and it happened very fast. I mean human beings are, we are social creatures. Just little interactions with others, we take for granted but it's vital to our well-being, you know. It's a, the psychological counterpart of food, we need it. You cut that off, put someone inside a cell with minimal human contact, and they deteriorate in a very painful way. Depression sets in, anxiety sets in… panic. I can't tell you how many cells we went to, where people had just cut themselves, the blood on their arms, blood on the walls. These agonized shellshocked faces, just begging for a reprieve. It absolutely is torture and to see it up close is very, very sobering, very disturbing. And the suicide rate for people in solitary confinement is much higher than in the general population and the suicide attempts. I mean, there was so many, you got used to it. You hate to say it but you're used to nooses. You're used to assessing how someone cut, how serious they were, and that's the… that's the realm that you live in. And I remember that feeling like, what country am I in? You know, I mean even John McCain, you know, the late Senator famously held in a POW camp in Vietnam. He absolutely said that I mean he was… his bones were broken, he was beaten so severely as a prisoner of war and he said that the very worst of the punishment that he endured was not the beatings, not the broken bones, he said it was solitary confinement. And to hear that from a US Senator, a war hero, a man who ran for president, and we're horrified about what he was subjected to and yet, we don't seem to make the connection, you know. With what is happening right here in to roughly… the numbers fluctuate, but it's somewhere between 60 and 80 thousand people in this country being held in these circumstances. 

SJ: Are there, are there any states in the US that are not using solitary anymore? Or they are only using it for very brief? Like, have we made any progress? I guess that's what I'm asking.

MB: I would say we are starting to make progress because 

ten years ago, you couldn't find anything about solitary confinement. You know online or in the media and now it is. It is so hidden and out of sight, jails are hidden and what happens inside we don't know about and the most forgotten of the forgotten and the hidden of the hidden are in solitary. 

SJ: Yeah, yeah.

MB: It's coming out and a few years ago, I had the privilege of going to Colorado as a guest of, again, Rick Raemisch, who was at that time the Director of Prisons in Colorado. And they had, I believe it was at the initiation of Governor John Hickenlooper who wanted to reform the prisons and he was especially interested in solitary confinement. And he was working with a, the Prison Director was a man named Tom Clements… and working on how to replace this with humane alternatives. Because I would say that when I mentioned before, so many people were in there, non-violent maybe 75%, but you still have about 25% who were violent. But again, do you torture them? Is that the way you manage them? So, this is the question that they face and they started working on alternatives. And what happened was… I mean, in quite the irony, a man was released from solitary, directly to the streets and he found out where Tom Clements lived and he got a gun went to the man’s door, knocked and Clemmons opened it and he shot and killed him. So here, Clements was really trying to change the system and he died, you know, in a terrible way. But to his credit, Governor Hickenlooper did not back down from it. He said this is all the more reason why we can't allow this and then he brought in Rick Raemisch. So Raemisch, it took… I think it started in 2011. It took them until about 2015, 16 to fully empty the solitary cells to create alternatives but they did it. They did it. I got to witness myself how they did it. Mental health is a big component of it. They had to change the culture of the place. They had to be supportive of the incarcerated, be supportive of the officers, it was nothing like Rikers Island and I got to go to several of the facilities there. And you know, I was I was just so so impressed with… they were trying, they're really trying and then Rick Raemisch left, I think at the end of 2016 and then I know Dean Williams replaced him. So, you know, the big question, the issue here is that they did it administratively. They made the decision to change it. In New York State I was part of a grass-roots effort of hundreds of people to abolish solitary in New York State prisons and it took about eight or nine years. But about a year and a half ago, the law was passed to limit solitary to 15 days. 

SJ: Alright.

MB: It is. It's very exciting. The only problem is that unlike Colorado where they wanted these changes and embraced them, New York is fighting tooth-and-nail against it. They're not receptive to a change of culture… to doing things differently. They are furious about it and want it repealed so there's constant issues here with how it's being implemented, if it is. But I do know that a number of people who were in solitary are now out because various organizations I work with have been in communication with them, and they have gotten out. So it has, you know, and the world has not ended over it.

SJ: You’re making some progress. 

——————————

Reading from Ch. 26 of Lockdown on Rikers Island

——————————

Closing 

SJ: 

TIME MARKERS:

0:50Meet Mary Buser

7:00 Assigned to Rikers Island as a student

8:30 Wait, you want to go BACK there?

10:00 A Guest in Their House

12:30 The Final Straw 

18:00 The Baddest of the Bad…or a Minor Rules Infraction?

21:00 What Solitary Confinement ACTUALLY Does to a Person

25:45 Tom Clemens, Rick Raemisch, and Reform in CO

29:25 from Ch. 26 Lockdown on Rikers Island