GOING INSANE IN THE SHU BOX
by Kay Lee T.J. Lowe was a marijuana prisoner, an educated man, a person who used herbs for his medicine, including marijuana. Quite simply, believe it or not, the illegal plant had eased the 'screaming cramps' of Crohn's Disease for T.J. for the previous 10 years. He got caught, he did his time, and paid for his crime with 7 years of his life.
T.J. survived prison medical care that was torture until finally it turned into neglect. Because his screams would grow so painful at times, other prisoners had mercy for him and would find him a pinch of marijuana to chew on to stop the screaming. The result was punishment. T.J. was held in the hole, the SHU (Security Housing Unit), several times for the marijuana, and the stay was usually 30 days. But the last time they caught him, they locked him down there for nine months. They gave him no sheets (until we got a senator to call in), no commissary, no phone calls, no TV, no visits, no medicine for nine long months.
I stayed with him, in a sense, writing him almost daily, sending him crossword puzzles and articles. We agreed early on that if three days went by without a letter from him, something was wrong and I was to contact the prison. I didn't know him when the nightmare began, but felt like he was my son by the time it was finally over.
In a sense he grew weaker during the long months, in another he grew stronger. Being an enterprising soul, T.J. learned to use food and water as medicine in the SHU. He could ease the cramps by eating certain foods very very slowly. So he would put his bowl of oatmeal and his fruit under his cot to eat as he needed. Every once in awhile, the guards would come in, noisily roust his cell, carry off his stash of food and letters, and leave him once again with nothing. I remember Christmas that year. T.J. was blessed to have an orange that he had managed to hide for the feast, and yes, for the physical and mental pain, he also slowly chewed a tiny pinch of the plant. Even in the SHU, a desperate and enterprising individual can occasionally come up with marijuana.
In his struggle to survive, T.J. became aware that not eating, just drinking water, kept the most severe cramps from coming. So he fasted. At first for 7 days, then 14, then 21 days, describing his visions and experiences. He once said, "If I don't eat again, I won't have cramps. And he began a fast that lasted way too long. His letters became disoriented, strange, with signs of what could have been visions as he thought, but could have just as easily been hallucinations as I thought.
I wrote, "T.J., it's been too long ... you need to eat." He wrote back, "Thank you. I was knock ... knock ... knocking on heaven's door."
Of course starvation does things to the mind, but he would have never gone that far in his normal state of being. The SHU had altered his perceptions and his judgments.
Isolation does strange things to the mind, and long isolations leave a prisoner with the same shell shock symptoms as war does. It's called Post Traumatic Stress and our prisoners are suffering from it. When T.J. got out, noises were extreme, the light hurt his eyes for weeks, his knees went bad, he was gaunt and pale and disoriented. The dreams still haunt his nights two years later.
But T.J. was strong and he had me. He was among the fortunate ones: he's still got his sanity, and I imagine his neighbors don't realize how fortunate they are that he didn't go crazy.
In America, 45,000 inmates live in solitary confinement. In Florida, I just discovered a prisoner who's been in the hole for three years in Union CI! On the MSNBC series called "LockUp," Dr. W. Schultz explained that in isolation sometimes insanity offers the only escape.
You know why you should care? Because a prisoner treated like this could move into your neighborhood when he gets out, and he might not be as strong as T.J.!