In the latest piece supported by a grant from our Ridgeway Reporting Project, incarcerated journalist Jeremy Busby exposes the shocking treatment endured by incarcerated people with mental illness, among others, in several Texas prisons. An excerpt appears below; read the full piece on Slate.

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I was standing in a containment cage, a contraption smaller than a telephone booth made of steel and mesh wire. It was standing room only in the cage, with no toilet or sink.

This was a regular part of life for a prisoner in solitary confinement in Texas. Every time I was transferred to a different prison facility, I found myself in one of these containment cages while the prison administration assigned me to a cell. This time, I’d spent the past 23 months in solitary confinement for possession of a contraband cellphone. Prison administrators had approved my release back into the general population, and I had been transferred to the William McConnell Unit in South Texas.

There were two other prisoners standing in the additional containment cages, one six feet to my left and the other six feet to my right. A small-framed young Latino kid named Sam was in the left containment cage, and Mike, a frail, elderly Black man with an unkempt gray beard was to my right. The moment my shackles and handcuffs were removed, Sam began telling me horror stories about McConnell. (I am using pseudonyms to protect the prisoners mentioned.)

Sam explained that he was enrolled in the McConnell Unit’s self-harm program because he expressed suicidal ideations. He had attempted suicide multiple times, and each time the prison administrators tossed him into a containment cage. On average, Sam spent four days in a containment cage before being transferred to a mental health facility.

This time, Sam had been in a containment cage for six consecutive days, without a single opportunity to access a toilet. Turning sideways inside his containment cage, Sam pointed at a pile of brown substance on his floor. It was dried feces. When I expressed my disbelief that he had been forced to relieve himself within his cage, Sam informed me that the feces belonged to the prisoners previously in the cage.

I stood in complete shock. Then I gazed quickly toward Mike’s containment cage. Eight cereal cartons lined the inside perimeter, each filled with liquid. Before I could ask, Sam answered my question; it was urine. Mike had been there four days after a failed suicide attempt. Instead of urinating on the floor, Mike saved empty cereal cartons from breakfast. The brown bags that lunch and dinner came in doubled as waste containers.

Sam and Mike both were placed on a prison protocol called CDO, or constant and direct observation. Suicidal prisoners were placed in this protocol until they were cleared by the prison’s mental health department or transferred to a mental health facility, a process that often took days.

Housing prisoners in containment cages for days is a widespread and unchecked practice in certain Texas prisons. At the other prisons where I had been held, suicidal individuals were placed in empty cells that at least had functioning plumbing and bunks, and space to move around. A guard was stationed outside of their cells to monitor the prisoners’ behavior patterns until they were cleared or transferred. Solitary confinement itself was horrific, but these containment cages were catastrophic. Even if the floors had not been littered with other prisoners’ feces or cartons filled with urine, there was no room to lie down.

As a prisoners’ rights advocate and journalist with two decades of bylines dedicated to the Texas prison system, I knew the system was antiquated and inhumane, but this shocked me to my core. These were the most dehumanizing conditions I had experienced within the Texas system. This was 2022, and these living conditions reminded me of conditions experienced by enslaved people in the 1800s. They infringed upon every protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution and on basic human morality…

When I assumed it could get no worse, Sam told me about the “dungeon” located at the back of the administration building. The administration of the McConnell Unit had taken an unused empty utility closet and retrofitted it with seven containment cages, stacked next to one another, to house suicidal prisoners.

In the dungeon, Sam told me, there were daily shouting contests between suicidal prisoners who suffered from schizophrenia, hallucinations, and other mental illnesses. Obscenities and threats were tossed relentlessly between prisoners at unbearable volumes in the tiny, windowless utility closet…

Read the full article on Slate.

Banner photo: Holding cells at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. Photo (c) 2006 by Richard Ross. No photographs of the “containment cages” used in Texas are publicly available.