I was moved onto unit 1EE on the south compound inside New Jersey State Prison a year ago. On the floor just above me is 2EE, which is known as “the crazy unit”.
This unit is where incarcerated men throughout the state are sent when they experience mental health difficulties. It has three cells for suicide watch, where men are stripped down and given “turtle suits”, thin vests that barely keep them covered. There are no pillows, blankets or sheets. A man is left with only his skin and his wits.
I can hear the guy in the cell directly above me. Sometimes it feels like he’s in the cell with me.
Banging is normal in prison. We hear it all day, constantly.
Listening to the sounds and activity above has given me insight into the terrible state of mental healthcare in prison and how badly we need changes. In the United States, roughly 40% of people in state prisons and local jails have a history of mental illness, but less than half of those folks receive treatment, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Individuals with signs of mental health issues can face additional risks and discipline while inside, including prison misconduct charges, longer solitary confinement periods and barriers to accessing medication.
In the time I’ve been here, I’ve heard three multiple episodes that have been particularly concerning. The first one started in November 2022 with the guy above me at the time. I call him the banging guy.
Boom, boom, boom!
He was banging on the toilet and his bunk.
Banging is normal in prison. We hear it all day, constantly. Doors bang against walls and slam to close. Guys stomp up the steps. Food ports, through which meal trays are provided, bang closed. And sometimes guys bang on something, anything, because they’re “wilding out”.
The banging started on a Sunday while I was watching football. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear the commentators on my 13-inch flat-screen TV.
I brushed It off as someone above me wilding out. I figured that the guy would end his tirade after an hour or so. Boy, was I wrong. The guy was still banging away even after the second game in the doubleheader had started. I was feeling a little agitated because I couldn’t hear the TV, and the noise had been going on for three hours.
Boom, boom, boom!
The guy had stamina and staying power.
I figured he would be done by the time I went to bed at 10pm, but he was still banging as I was tucking in. How was this humanly possible? How was he able to bang so hard for so long? Where were the nurses?
Sunday turned into Monday and the week went by until the following Sunday, and this guy still had not stopped banging apart from small breaks, when I imagined he was dozing off. It was clear that he needed help. I was starting to feel like I needed help myself. I wasn’t able to sleep or hear myself think.
I sympathized with the man above me. He was probably trying to drown out the voices in his head. He was obviously going through something.
I knew he wasn’t alone. Lots of guys incarcerated here come with a history of mental illness and are labeled “special needs”.
As a juvenile, a kid might try to get out of being locked up by saying they were going to kill themselves, so they could get sent to a psych unit where they might be treated better. They don’t realize that it will put them on the special needs list forever. As an adult, at least in New Jersey State Prison, a person can get labeled special needs for complaining that they can’t sleep.
A special needs designation means that you’ll be at the mercy of the mental health department. It can land you in a bad spot. The side effects of medication they might give you could be crippling. Some guys get hooked on the drugs and never wake up again.
After this first incident, things returned to normal for about a week. Then one night, the banging started again. This time, I heard rumbling.
Boom! Bang! Bink!
I guessed that officers rushed into the cell and beat the defenseless man up. This was typical, especially on the crazy unit. Up there, Code 33S – the fighting code – went down constantly because incarcerated men were wilding out on an officer. They called the code after they rushed the cell and handled business.
On this occasion, I could hear the man screaming like he was being murdered.
“Ahhh! My neck!” he screamed over the booms, bangs and binks.
I turned the radio up to drown out the noise.
The next morning I asked the porter who worked on the floor above – a fellow incarcerated man – if the guy was okay.
“He didn’t have a scratch on him,” the porter said. He said the guy had whipped the officers.
The following couple of nights, I heard him scraping something on the floor, as if he were making a shank. Whatever he was scraping sounded light and thin, nothing heavy. I hoped he wasn’t planning on shanking a cop.
The scraping turned into sounds of him rolling onto the floor, followed by what sounded like him repeatedly falling on the floor.
With every passing day, this guy seemed to be getting worse. Was he trying to kill himself?
The porter told me that the guy above me now was a different person. He was in the cell naked, rolling on the floor. Then he was screaming, “No, no! Don’t leave me! Come back!”
During the last two days before he was moved into another cell, he began to flush the toilet without releasing the button for hours at a time.
I asked the porter who worked the unit what the deal was. The porter feared retaliation, so he didn’t want me to reveal his name, but he said he hardly ever saw any psych staff when he was on duty. There was a nurse’s station on the unit, but he said they only passed out medication.
Over the years he’s worked on the crazy unit, the porter said, he could count the number of times that he had seen the psych staff speak with patience to the men in the mental health unit. Meanwhile, the number of faces occupying the suicide watch cells were uncountable. He had seen guys in all states – some who faked mental health issues, others with serious psychiatric illnesses, and everything in between.
“The psych only talks to a patient and scribbles on their pad,” he told me, adding that it didn’t make sense because they weren’t talking to a coherent person. “The guy is usually in a bad mental state where he is unable to articulate or comprehend what’s going on. Then he is tossed right back in a cold cell.”
Another porter who worked there described similar conditions. He saw the psych visiting patients every day, but said “they don’t care about the guys”.
The last sounds I heard having to do with the banging guy came on December 16, 2022. At approximately 8.15pm, I heard the intercom crackle. The announcer shouted: “Code 53 2EE.”
This was no fight. Code 53 was the code for a medical emergency. This incident was happening right above me. The code lasted for about an hour.
The next morning, I learned that the guy who had been above me, the guy who I heard screaming, had died.
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Kory McClary is a writer for the Prison Journalism Project, a non-profit news organization that provides incarcerated writers with tools and training. As part of a partnership, a reporter with MindSite News, a non-profit news outlet that covers mental health, investigated the death – and life – of the man who had been incarcerated above McClary. That story can be found here.
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This story is the product of a collaboration between the Prison Journalism Project, MindSite News and the Guardian US.
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