Jim Kenyon is a columnist for the Valley News, in which this was first published Dec. 14, 2014.
[A]t 19, Sam Ramsey is one of Vermont’s youngest prison inmates. Fewer than 1 in 20 are under age 21. He’s also one of the few offenders behind bars who hasn’t been convicted of a felony, the most serious crimes that carry the stiffest penalties. Nine out of 10 Vermont inmates arrived in prison by way of a “Big F” conviction.
But in one respect, Ramsey is more typical of the people that Vermont locks up: He struggles with some form of mental illness.
On average, more than 850 of the 2,300 prisoners incarcerated in Vermont during the 2014 fiscal year were prescribed psychotropic drugs — medications used to control a person’s mood and behavior — each month.
That’s 37 percent.
Prisons are known to be human warehouses for good reason. Since his incarceration in September 2013, Ramsey has received little to no mental health counseling.
DOC’s treatment plan — if it can be called that — consists mostly of providing him with two dosages a day of Depakote, a mood stabilizer that he’s taken since he was 9 years old.
Vermont mirrors what’s happening elsewhere in the country.
The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a Harvard research center, posted an article on its website earlier this year that pretty much sums up where we’re at nationally with prisons and the mentally ill: “According to some estimates, as much as 50 percent of the U.S. prison population suffers from some form of mental illness. As a consequence, each year thousands of mentally ill offenders are sent to prisons that — because of overcrowding and limited resources — are poorly equipped to treat them. They are placed in solitary confinement, subjected to punishments inappropriate for their conditions and end up serving longer sentences than the general inmate population.”
That’s Sam Ramsey to a T.
I first wrote about Ramsey in 2001, when he was a kindergartner in Quechee. Along with his mother and two older brothers, he was part of the Other Side of the Valley series that chronicled the ups and downs of four working families living on the edge of economic uncertainty. Last month, in a follow-up to the 2001 series, I wrote about Ramsey’s battle with mental illness, which dates back to his elementary school days.
Ramsey has spent most of his teen years in residential treatment facilities for troubled youths with psychiatric illnesses. His anti-social behavior led to numerous physical altercations with other teens and staff at six institutions in seven years.
When he was 16, Ramsey assaulted a female counselor at Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex, and criminal charges resulted. The Vermont Department for Children and Families, which runs Woodside, the state’s only locked facility for juveniles, made him pay heavily.
From reviewing Ramsey’s sealed juvenile court records, which I did with his permission, it looks to me that DCF began maneuvering to put him behind bars shortly after he turned 18. To avoid a felony conviction, which can make it much more difficult to get a job, a college loan, or even a hunting license, Ramsey agreed to plead guilty to three misdemeanor charges of simple assault.
He’s now been in prison for 15 months, but it will still be a while before he’s out. If he serves his maximum sentence, he won’t be released until February 2017, which, among other things, means he will have gone nearly 3½ years without mental health counseling.
Through it all, Kerrie Ramsey has remained a devoted mom. On Sunday mornings, she makes the two-hour drive from her home in Windsor to the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, 15 miles from the Canadian border.
Last Sunday, I made the trip with her. During the weekly two-hour visit, the maximum that inmates are allowed in Vermont, they talked about the Batman comic books she had sent him and author Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein trilogy, which he had picked up in the prison library. “He’s really good. I like him,” Ramsey told his mother.
He’s had more time to read than usual recently.
For punching out his cellmate, Ramsey spent 11 days, including Thanksgiving, in the “hole,” prison lingo for solitary confinement. What led to the fight with his cellmate? “He was running his mouth,” said Ramsey, who stands 6-foot-5 and weighs 220 pounds.
When prison officials questioned him about the incident, Ramsey didn’t mention that he’d gone two weeks without taking his mood-stabilizing medication. “I was trying to wean myself off it,” he said. “I was doing pretty well for a while.”
From what I gather, the Department of Corrections doesn’t monitor inmates to see if they are actually taking the medications that have been prescribed. I left phone messages and emailed Dr. Delores Burroughs-Biron, DOC’s medical director, but didn’t hear back.
After seeing her son last Sunday, Kerrie Ramsey started to worry when she didn’t hear from him on Tuesday. He usually calls home at least every other day. Finally, on Wednesday night, the phone rang. “I’m not in the hole again,” he assured his mother.
Instead he was in the prison infirmary. He’d come down with a high fever caused by a staph infection in his leg. Kerrie Ramsey, who has a background as a respiratory therapist, talked with a prison nurse. Her son would probably stay in the infirmary for a week as a precautionary measure, the nurse said.
In prison, it’s body over mind.
