For years, people incarcerated on the disciplinary tiers at David Wade Correctional Center in north Louisiana — including those with mental illness — were confined for too long in cells that were too small, sometimes without bedding or without anything except a paper gown.
They were not given meaningful access to mental health care beyond psychotropic medication — and even that was administered haphazardly.
Those were the findings of U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Foote of the Western District of Louisiana in 2022, when she ruled in favor of Wade prisoners being held in solitary confinement in a class-action lawsuit against the prison. David Wade’s overly harsh disciplinary system, combined with its failure to provide mental healthcare had the “mutually enforcing effect of depriving individuals of basic mental health needs and exposing them to mental torture,” she ruled.
Foote found that the prison was using solitary confinement, as a “depository for the mentally ill,” holding prisoners in their cells for more than 22 hours a day.
Last week, Foote again found that Wade’s prisoners are continuing to suffer from those “inhumane and torturous conditions.” She ordered oversight and remedial measures to bring the facility to constitutional standards.
The conditions at David Wade can be remedied by court order because, Foote found, they violate prisoners’ constitutional rights, to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, along with a violation of other federal statutes, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
The original November 2022 ruling followed a 17-day hearing called the “liability-phase” of trial.
A few months later, Foote presided over the “remedy-phase” portion of trial, to determine whether the prison was continuing to violate prisoners’ rights and what measures needed to be implemented to improve conditions.
Last week, Foote ordered federal oversight, after finding that not much had changed since her initial ruling nearly two years ago.
The prison continues to house prisoners with mental illness in solitary confinement, its mental healthcare is riddled with systemic deficiencies, and its suicide watch procedures are used by some guards to punish prisoners, Foote said.
On one occasion recounted to the court after a prisoner had exhibited “self-injurious behavior,” he was put on suicide watch in his cell wearing only a paper gown, handcuffs, waist chains, and shackles. He hadn’t been consistently taking his medication, he said, and told a guard that wanted to see a social worker. Instead, the guard pepper-sprayed him twice while in his cell, once for banging his head against the wall, and then again for not immediately responding to an order.
“Certainly, pepper-spraying an inmate for exhibiting self-injurious behavior — one who is already in restraints for cutting himself — is not going to remedy the situation or improve his mental health,” Foote wrote.
Foote’s most recent ruling marks the second time in as many years that a federal judge placed a Louisiana prison under federal oversight. Last fall, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana ordered oversight of what she described as the “abhorrent” medical care at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The state has appealed that order.
Mental illness is pervasive in prisons throughout the country. Over 40 percent of state prisoners in the U.S. have a history of mental health problems, a 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found.
A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections did not respond to a request from The Lens for comment or say whether the department plans to appeal Friday’s David Wade ruling. Even before the trial began in 2022, the state had already paid $2.9 million to private defense attorneys for the David Wade case.
In a press release, Disability Rights Louisiana, who represented the prisoners, said that they were “gratified” by Foote’s ruling, but disappointed that the DOC had continued to combat the case in court instead of remedying the violations at David Wade.
“Rather than correcting the problems,” they wrote, “the State chose to fight this case and spend millions in litigation costs.”
Solitary confinement and ‘strip cell status’
Up until at least August 2022 — the cutoff date for evidence in the trial — David Wade continued to house prisoners, including those with mental illness, in undersized cells with nothing to do for long periods of time, subjecting them to “psychological pain” and putting them “at risk of mental decompensation,” Foote found.
“Inmates are confined to incredibly small spaces with no visual or mental stimulation and with inadequate opportunities for physical activity,” Foote wrote. “These conditions persist not just for a day or two, but for indefinite time periods which may be months or, for some inmates, years.”
David Wade also continues to be the only prison in the state to respond to disciplinary infractions by imposing a harsh punishment known as “strip cell status,” which consists of placing a prisoner in a cell in nothing but a paper gown.
All personal items, even bedding, is removed from the cell during the day. Guards are supposed to return mattresses to the strip cells between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., but some prisoners reported having to resort to sleeping on concrete floors or a bare metal rack because bedding was not returned on time.
Prison policy requires staff to review most prisoners on strip cell status every four hours, but those with a “documented pattern of behavior” can be placed there for an undetermined amount of time, with staff reviews only every seven days. That weekly review does not involve any mental health clinicians.
At the remedy trial, the former superintendent of the Washington state prison system testified that strip cell status was an “illegitimate practice” that treated “people in a way in which they are subhuman.”
In her opinion, Foote concurred.
Since the first trial, Foote found, David Wade officials had “failed to make any substantive changes to improve or mitigate the psychological harms of extended lockdown, the harsh conditions of confinement, the indefinite length of time on extended lockdown, and the unconstitutional disciplinary procedures in practice.”
Mental health
Foote found similarly scant improvement in mental healthcare.
The prison continues to employ only one, part-time psychiatrist, Dr. Gregory Seal, who meets with prisoners via video conference. He doesn’t adequately screen prisoners for mental health conditions, and fails to perform requisite mental health evaluations, the court found.
Though Dave Wade officials claimed that they had improved individualized treatment plans for prisoners with mental illness, Foote found that those efforts amounted to “another example of DWCC’s tendency to simply ‘go through the motions.’” Her criticisms were based on her findings about the plans, which were insufficiently individualized and reviewed, with little prisoner input, and “no metrics or key performance indicators, to measure an inmate’s success in meeting the goals or action plans.”
The prison also uses suicide watch — in conditions similar to strip cell status — to punish prisoners for alleged disciplinary infractions, Foote found, which subjects some of the prison’s “most vulnerable inmates to mental and emotional torture.”
Beyond limiting inhumane punishment of prisoners, Foote examined the treatment provided to those with a mental-health diagnosis.
The prison continues to rely almost solely on medication to treat prisoners, she found, without any counseling and therapy.
Toward the end of 2021, the prison did briefly employ a psychologist, who quit after only a few months because “the environment wasn’t right for her.” To date, the prison has not hired anyone else in that role.
As a result, prisoners on the disciplinary tiers are not given access to any meaningful individual or group counseling. They have access only to “correspondence classes,” during which they are issued handouts to “complete on their own in their cell(s) and mail back to the mental health department for any feedback.” Those classes are “inaccessible to much of the segregated housing population and require a trained professional to either counsel or teach them the materials,” Foote found.
Dr. Seal, the prison’s sole psychiatrist, is contracted to meet with patients eight hours a week via video conference.That rarely happens, Foote found, citing records showing that Dr. Seal frequently worked only eight hours a month in 2021, and that he had only once fulfilled his contractual obligations in the first six months of 2022.
Seal “falsely testified about his schedule and how many days he works,” Foote contended.
“The infrequency of his visits results in a lack of mental health services to inmates, especially when the provision of psychotropic medication continues to be the sole treatment provided to inmates at DWCC,” she wrote.