A mentally ill man died after spending seven days in a New York City jail cell, the Associate Press reported.
Bradley Ballard, 39, was confined to a jail cell for seven days straight after he made lewd gestures to a female prison guard at Rikers Island. During that time he was denied his medication and caused severe bodily harm to himself. The guards never entered his cell to intervene.
Ballard died in September after being rushed to a hospital. He was found naked in his cell, covered in feces with his genitals swollen due to a rubber band he had tied around the area.
"He didn't have to leave this world like that," Ballard's mother, Beverly Ann Griffin, told the AP. Her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia more than 10 years ago.
"They could have put him in a mental hospital, got him some treatment. He was a caring young man," Griffin said.
The circumstances of his death were revealed in interviews with officials and documents obtained by the AP. The reports reveal how the city's prison system is lacking in its ability to administer proper treatment to the mentally ill.
Ballard was sent to prison last summer for a parole violation after serving a six-year sentence for an assault.
The inmate was bounced around several prison units for the mentally ill before he landed in a cell in Rikers' mental observation unit for seven days beginning on Sept 4. He was denied his medication for most of the days.
One day Ballard flooded the cell by clogging his toilet. A mental health official spoke to him through the door but never entered the cell, the AP reported. Prison staff checked on Ballard several times each day over the next few days, sometimes seeing Ballard on the floor.
On Sept. 11, Ballard was found unresponsive in his cell with his genitals infected. He was rushed to a hospital where he later died.
"Correctional institutions are such a poor substitute for mental hospitals, which is what they're basically functioning as in our society," Dr. Brandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist who wrote a report criticizing the use of solitary confinement, told the AP.
Nearly 40 percent of the city's 12,000 inmates are mentally ill, but often times prison employees do not receive the proper training to deal with mentally ill inmates.
"The problem is the correction setting is not fit to deliver the proper care, and in fact many of the settings exacerbate their symptoms."
