My family friend, Sabir, has spent the last ten years behind bars. Instead of jail, it’s a maximum security wing of a state psychiatric hospital, which some will argue, has similar conditions to prison. I’d say each hospital needs to be assessed on its own. At 19, Sabir broke into a neighbor’s house to profess his love to a woman in the upstairs bedroom. It was out of character for him; he had no criminal record, didn’t hang out with the wrong crowd. During his trial, doctors discovered he was bipolar, and a manic episode had caused him to break and enter into her home.
At 19, you were on your first world tour. At 19, I was trying to figure out my major in college. We were lucky we weren’t faced with a possible jail sentence. I wonder where Frank Hoover was at 19?
At 40, Frank Hoover is currently in an Austin, Texas county jail awaiting trial for allegedly stalking you and sending threatening emails to you and your father. I cannot imagine how terrified you and your family must be, and I wish you didn’t have to go through this. I imagine the girl whose home Sabir entered must have been terrified as well.
In your situation, it makes sense to think the solution is to put Frank behind bars so he can’t harm you. But I encourage you to think about the best course of action for him, whose case has been pushed back to investigate his competency and who has been hospitalized three times for mental illness.
Prison is no place for the mentally ill.
“If you ask most people today where the mentally ill are in our society, they will tell you they’re in state mental hospitals. They’re wrong . . . They are in our jails and prisons.” -Judge Steven Leifman, Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Miami, Florida in journalist Pete Earley’s Crazy
In 2014, 55% of men had at least one mental disorder in state prisons. Since most state psychiatric hospitals have closed down in the late 1960s, the mentally ill have been shifted to prisons, where their illnesses worsen from long periods of isolation, violence, and lack of proper psychiatric care. The mentally ill kill themselves more than other inmates and are targets of violence and sexual abuse. Once they are released from prison, they often come back multiple times for small charges, which perpetuates a vicious cycle that leaves no room for rehabilitation.
In 2014, the ninth floor of the Miami-Dade County Pretrial Detention Center which housed the mentally ill, was closed down after the US Department of Justice deemed the conditions unconstitutional. Here is one incident from that floor: earlier that year, an inmate with schizophrenia and major depression was beaten so badly by correctional officers that doctors had to remove his spleen. The officers allegedly punched him in the ribs and face, body-slammed him onto the ground and stood on his head until he passed out.
This prison is not an anomaly and I can see Frank suffering further if sent to one, where the root cause of his stalking is left untreated. Instead, mental health advocates have pushed through programs that divert prisoners to outpatient treatment programs, like the Miami-Dade Criminal Mental Health Project or Assisted Outpatient Programs, as well as trying them in mental health courts. All of these may be alternatives for Frank.
I write this to you not as an expert or a researcher but as a person trying to promote greater understanding for the mentally ill. Though I don’t know him personally, there are too many Franks out there, who are left behind and forgotten when it comes to institutionalized, comprehensive health care.
I have a lot to learn myself but here are some resources that may be helpful:
- Crazy by Pete Earley
- The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill by Gerald N. Grob
- Treatment Advocacy Center and The Stepping Up Initiative - nonprofits with the goal to lower the number of mentally ill in prison
I know what I’m asking is a lot, and thank you for taking the time to read and think about this.
Sincerely,
A longtime fan