Jared Loughner’s “Sentence”

Will multiple murderer Jared Loughner escape punishment? Will the man who, last January, put a bullet through the skull of never see a day in prison? Has the decision by federal judge Larry Burns to accept a professional diagnosis of schizophrenia saved Loughner from paying any penalty for killing six people and injuring 13 others at a political event that horrible Arizona day?

No. A person who is declared incompetent to stand trial for reasons of “insanity” (a dated and non-professional word) does not escape punishment. In fact, the “sentence” is potentially worse than any prison term—potentially even worse than a life sentence.

Psychiatric institutions are worse than prisons. And psychiatric blocks in prisons are even more horrible. A jail sentence comes with a term Even a life term often can lead to parole after those many decades of incarceration take the violent offender past the age when testosterone rules the passions.

But, when the court gives a criminal a psychiatric label, that offender has no time period or objective conditions to determine his or her sentence. Such a person as Jared Loughner is at the mercy of the criminal justice system and mentally ill inmates have no lobby working for them in Washington or in Phoenix.

Some “schizophrenic” or “paranoid schizophrenic” (as one court appointed psychiatrist called Loughner) people have been cured. But such cases are relatively rare.

We have turned such people out into the streets to live over heating grates in the winter and under bridges in the summer and in public or church shelters in the rain—betraying the promise of the 1950s—with the discovery of tranquilizers—to create a network of outpatient community mental health centers. The cost of such centers was too high—although Loughner illustrates the higher cost of not attending to these damaged people’s needs.

So maybe now doctors will work to heal Loughner. But in doing so, they will be preparing him to stand trial for a capital offense. Psychiatrists may well find this mandate morally unacceptable and leave him to stew in the swamp of his own emotional turmoil rather than hang.

I worked at Graterford prison south of Allentown, Pennsylvania as a chaplain for over a year and visited the cell block that housed mentally ill inmates. I saw each individual every week. The other prisoners lived in cells the size of a bathroom in one of five two-story corridors—each housing 600 prisoners.

These men had access to the prison yard, with its jogging track, baseball field, and basketball court. They could go to a gym or a tiny library. They could go to prison jobs where their salary started at 42 cents/hour but could triple that over the years. With their income they could buy approved snacks and toiletries at the prison store and eventually even a little television and after that perhaps a cable connection, with its monthly fee.

Since guards complete an inmate census seven times a day, that leaves only relatively short periods of time when they allow prisoners out of their cells. But during these periods—a couple of hours in the morning, after lunch, and in the evening—they not only work or exercise or take classes or socialize, they create a prison culture, parallel to ours, in which friends are made and people argue and gossip is shared, sometimes about each other but just as often about the prison staff—who become subjects of great interest. They don’t tell their own stories but they are interested in each other’s. Stories lubricate the day and connect the weeks into months and the months into years and the years into decades. 

But those in the mental ward have no such life. A triangular common area—with a picnic table and benches and a Ping Pong table—is surrounded on three sides by individual cells where prisoners spend most of their day. A guard can see their every move; you cannot pick your nose unnoticed.

Their cells have no TV. A single old television sits on a stand in the common area—more snow on the screen than picture—with the volume turned way up so everyone can hear, though, unless there is a sporting even, no one seems to watch. The prison meals, designed primarily to save tax dollars, lose heat during the trip on carts from the kitchen (and while waiting for a guard to distribute them) and thus become even more unappetizing.

Prison clergy and psychologists visit each of these cells every day, asking, “How are you doing?” and rarely much more. The inmates’ main activity is silently plotting how to convince someone in authority to permit a phone call to an imagined girl friend or a likely sick mother or father—almost always with no success—the only result being more frustration and increased isolation. 

The smell and filth of this block of cells is typical of what one might expect of such a setting. Food ends up on the floor, where many sleep. Sewer drains back up. Showers may be taken daily but are required only twice a week. Inmates here are allowed outside, weather permitting, but only for an hour a day and only into what looks like a dog run except that the chain link fence accommodates a 6 ft. human being.

They can request reading material but what they mostly have access to is religious pablum. Once a prisoner in one of these mental cells hit me painfully in the gut with the core of his apple. I looked at him, shocked at the accuracy he managed from such a sharp angle. “Why did you do that?” I demanded. I had been bringing him, at some risk, reading material he’d requested. “I was aiming for the guard,” he replied. Yeah, right.

Jared Loughner will never enjoy another day in his life. This is one sentence I am confident to write.