Every article I could find says it was 2 men that set themselves on fire due to solitary confinement conditions, with another setting himself on fire years earlier…
Where’s this “dozen” claim coming from, othet than cherry-picked sources?
My state’s DoC recruiters have been AFTER me on indeed and I almost went for it while getting out of my last job because I love that population (I started my psych career in forensics) but that’s the problem I love them so much and I don’t think I could cope with coming to work to this:
Apparently what’s not well depicted in the image is the smell, a lot of them have been restrained in those positions for 24h+ so they’re covered in urine and feces on top of the already overwhelming BO. There’s also a lot of wildlife in the room with them as I understand it. My psych nursing background is just screaming imagining everything from the chemical and mechanical skin breakdown, the positional blood clotting from the extended restraints, and the horrifying amount of infectious material (and parasites) against open skin.
They’re such beautifully clever human beings. Half of the time when they found a way to circumvent unit rules I had to pause for a moment just to admire the ingenuity of what they’d pulled off. I would argue most of them were actually more polite than my average patient now. You call them sir and ma’am cuz you’re in the south and you get it right back. When you go to clean the dayrooms you have three of them jump up to help. I played the hardest rounds of chess and spades of my life at that job. Their senses of humor are exquisitely dark. You can’t turn your back on them for a second and they’ll definitely keep you on your toes but you’ll also be shocked sometimes by how much they do have your back when shit is hitting the fan. This is gonna sound completely unhinged but I’m childfree and kinda even trans (got fixed this last may in light of current events) and the closest I’ve ever come to feeling maternal was when I was working with the correctional population.
The correctional population is amazing and yet I can never work with them because on top of not being given the support and rehabilitative services they deserve (assuming they’ve even committed a real crime and not just got caught with their own personal weed), they’re constantly being pushed further and further into some absolutely depraved conditions and I feel terrible because I want to be there and try to help them but I don’t think the current system will even really let me do that. As much as I love them I can’t be part of torturing them.
Do what you can for people. It seems like you actually care and the world needs more people doing great things in the world like you’re capable of. And most of all take care of yourself.
What kind of wildlife is in the room with them?
Arthropods mostly, some that just enjoy sharing habitats with humans, but also many of who use humans as habitats. A fair amount of rodents as well. An infrequent, but not insignificant number of larger fauna too, such as snakes, raccoons, birds, and bats (found a copperhead in the cafeteria once, and that was a brand new state hospital). And while you (probably) wouldn’t find them in a room this small or interior, deer populations tend to be rather large around state and federal institutions due to restrictions on firearm carrying and usage on the land; you can’t just have hunters wandering around with guns after all. One facility I worked at would grant a few extremely carefully screened bow and arrow permits once per season, otherwise the deer would start blocking the fire exits and getting into the recreation yards. I was never big into hunting myself but apparently the size of the antlers was desirable to the hunters (and inversely desirable to me as something to be trapped in a small fenced-in area with).
You’re damn right about the chess and ingenuity! 10 months spent in jail made me so good at chess! I watched the reasons they took the tablets away.