Bill To Ban ‘the Box' For Mentally Ill To Be Sent to Pataki

ALBANY — Despite three previous suicide attempts and a long history of mental illness, 36-year-old James Butler was treated like just another prisoner with disciplinary problems.

He was put in "the box," housed alone in a cell 23 hours a day for months at a time at Fishkill Correctional Facility. Butler, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, took his own life in June 2000, his mother, Elsie Butler, said yesterday.

"Putting James in the box did not help him," she said.

Under a bill being sent to Governor Pataki on August 4, mentally ill inmates in New York prisons would no longer be put in solitary confinement. Instead they would be placed in a residential mental health treatment program.

If signed by the Republican governor, New York would join a handful of states, including California, Florida, and Texas, that ban the practice of putting mentally ill prisoners in so-called "special housing units," said mental health advocates who came to the state Capitol to push for Mr. Pataki's approval of the measure.

A state senator, Michael Nozzolio, and an Assembly member, Jeffrion Aubrey, sponsors of the bill, say about 8,000, or 12%, of the state's 63,500 inmates are affected by serious mental illness. When put in solitary confinement, those prisoners are three times more likely to commit suicide or mutilate themse lves than inmates in the general prison population.

Nearly a quarter of the roughly 7,600 inmates in special housing units are being treated for some type of mental illness. Half of those suffer from depression and 28% suffer from either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, according to a survey by the Correctional Association, a watchdog group for prisoners and their families.