The Forgotten Floor - CBS4 I-Team Investigation
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Sep 18, 2006 11:43 pm US/Eastern
The Forgotten Floor - CBS4 I-Team Investigation
Shocking Conditions Revealed At Miami-Dade's Jail
Michele Gillen, Reporting
(CBS4 News) MIAMI You can hear the cries from the hallway, through plexiglas and solid steel doors.
?I can?t breathe in here, I can?t breathe. Take me out. I can?t breathe,? cries the inmate from his cell.
Prison insiders call this the forgotten floor, but it seems unimaginable that the horrendous and horrifying conditions of a jail spilling over with the mentally ill could be erased from any sane man?s mind.
?I am butt naked, laying on the dirty floor. This is ain?t right,? one inmate told CBS4 Chief Investigative Reporter Michele Gillen.
Some beg for help, for the barest of necessities. Some ask for water, but the faucets are dry.
?The water is not working,? one inmate told the I-Team. ?He is drinking sewer water out of the toilet.?
In stench filled cells designed for one person, outfitted with only a single steel shelf for a bed, two, three, sometimes even five men, diagnosed with mental illness and many arrested for minor crimes, are locked up for days, weeks or months.
Said one inmate, ?I want the public to know that people are urinating on the floor and we have to sleep on top of it. They are defecating on the floor and we are sleeping on top of it. There is only one bunk and it is made of steel.?
He said four people were living in the cell at that time. They are only allowed out of their cell for 15 minutes, two times a week.
?This is it," says Miami-Dade Judge Stephen Leifman. "Lights are on 24/7. The conditions you see just do not change.?
?I have been to Vietnam . I have been in Vietnam for 18 months. I was in Vietnam ,? an inmate of this facility told the I-Team. ?It?s worse, this, being here. I wouldn?t put a dog in here. My dog, I wouldn?t put my dog in here.?
This is not a draconian penitentiary in some far away land. In the shadow of the Miami skyline, in the heart of the city, it is the Miami-Dade Pre-Trial Detention Center -- the downtown jail, where we found a dark secret.
?Unfortunately we are treating people with chronic mental illnesses like we did in the 16 and 17 hundreds,? said Dr. Joseph Portier, the jail?s chief psychiatrist. ?You read about how people in asylums in prison during that time.
You would think that in 2006 we would treat people with chronic illness in a much better, more humane way, but unfortunately we are reverting back to how we treated people back in the 16 and 17 hundreds. It is terrible. It is morally incomprehensible. ?
That sentiment is echoed by an outraged Miami-Dade County Judge, Stephen Leifman.
?The time bomb is about to go off,? he told the CBS4 I-Team. ?And that?s our big concern right now. You can see, feel the tension in here because of the volume of people.?
Leifman has relentlessly fought to improve conditions for the mentally ill in South Florida and in this very jail. ?This is a bad secret. It?s a sad secret,? he said.
What most people don?t know is that the Miami-Dade Jail now serves as the largest psychiatric facility in the State of Florida . 3 of 9 floors are burgeoning with mentally ill inmates in desperate need of psychiatric treatment, not the type of confinement designed to punish people.
?There are five times as many people in our jail with mental illness than any psychiatric hospital in Florida ,? pointed out Judge Leifman. ?Five times, right here.?
Many are sick and will linger in the system, if not get lost for months, in what for some is an abyss of madness, and guess who foots the bill?
Judge Leifman said, ?It?s a tough place. It?s not a great condition for anybody that is sick because it is not conducive for treatment. People with mental illness stay in jail eight times longer than sometime without mental illness for the exact same charge and it cost the taxpayers seven times more to treat him here. It doesn?t really accomplish anything here. It?s a warehouse.?
Judge Leifman pointed out the number of people sleeping in a cell intended for a single mentally ill inmate, gesturing to a steel bunk.
?If you look underneath there is someone sleeping in the back underneath.? he said. An elderly man emerged from the dirt and darkness, and judge pointed out the others. ?There?s one on the floor, underneath the bunk, and one or two standing around waiting for their turn to sleep.?
The hands of a 26-year old inmate tremble as he speaks. ?This is not a way that you treat human beings. You can?t treat human beings this way, no beds, no sheets no mattresses, sleeping on the floor.? The man was eager to speak. ?Hopefully with your help, people will know what?s going on here.?
Floor 9, the so-called forgotten floor, houses patients who suffer from the most acute mental illnesses.
?You can see they are not given mattresses either because they are afraid they are going to hurt themselves. This was not built as a psychiatric facility,? said Judge Leifman. ?It?s a jail. And the jail has to do what it can to protect them but at the same time they need treatment and its costing money and lives to do it this way.?
Dr. Portier admits the overcrowding and terrible conditions sometimes make him want to scream. ?Sometimes yes, but that is how society is now. Jails and prisons have essentially become mental institutions.?
How did this happen? According to authorities, there is not one psychiatric care bed available at the few state mental hospitals that remain open in Florida . In fact, there is a 333-person waiting list in the State. Most of the requests are for Miami-Dade County residents, the urban area in the US with the largest percentage of mentally ill people.
While the CBS4 I-Team was in the facility, they saw an inmate being held in the shower. He was not there to bathe.
?They are just holding him in there. There is no where to hold him, that?s the shower.? Judge Leifman said, noting that Corrections officers simply had no place else to put him. ?Just for a few minutes. Because there is nowhere else. There is no where else, there is no room.?
"You can't treat human beings this way," says one inmate. "Sometimes we value our society by how we treat the most vulnerable. And I think we are not donig a very good job."
Amid screams of a man who thinks he is Batman, the men on Floor 9, barefoot and shivering, stripped and naked, all suffering from mental illnesses pace in frigid air pumped into cells sealed with Plexiglas.
From one inmate, a statement which seemed to capture the situation. ?You can?t treat human beings this way,? he said.
But at the Miami-Dade detention center, that treatment is the norm. Bodies are strewn across the floors of cells designed to hold one inmate. In the most dreaded cell, the wrists and ankles of suicidal inmates are shackled to a gurney.
?Look back at the 1700's, people with mental diseases were thrown into jails and prisons. They were not given heat, they don't need heat, they are mentally ill,? said Pete Earley, an award winning author and former reporter for the Washington Post. ?Now zoom forward to 2006. Miami ; the 9th floor. People are kept naked in cells. They don't need heat. They don?t mind the cold. They are being treated the same way as they were in the 1700's. My god now can this be possible??
In 2004, Early spent a year documenting conditions at the Miami-Dade pre-trial detention center.
?I found Miami ?s jail to be horrific,? he said. ?It was really like stepping back into medieval times.?
The CBS4 I-Team investigation found it had grown worse over time.
?Unfortunately we are reverting back to how we treated people back in the 16th and 17th hundreds. It is terrible. It is morally incomprehensible,? said Dr. Joseph Portier, the facility?s chief psychiatrist.
But Portier says there is no place else to send the patients, and Judge Steve Leifman agrees.
?We basically have closed all the state hospitals in this country,? he said, ?and we have transferred people from state hospitals to jails.?
Judge Leifman been credited with Herculean efforts to keep the mentally ill who commit minor crimes out of jail and in treatment. But dollars for treatment have dried up, and so record numbers of mentally ill inmates are warehoused here.
?They are just trying to keep the lid on so it doesn?t explode up here,? said Leifman. ?When you get four or five people with serious mental illness in a small cell, 24 hours, seven days a week, it is going to explode.?
? Every second of the day you are behind these doors. They feed us through this hole,? one inmate told the I-Team.
?We?ve stripped their dignity away from them,? said Kate Hale, Director of the Mental Health Association of Miami-Dade County.
?If we had this kind of care and treatment in the Dade County animal shelter, people would be up in arms, if they could see how inmates are living in that jail on the psych wards, if they could see that, and respond the same way they respond to kittens and puppies, then things begin to change but nobody wants to look.?
Incredibly, these scandalous conditions have long been documented. Just last year a Miami Dade county grand jury report investigating the ninth floor likened it to scenes from the movie, ?One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest.?
26 years ago, the federal government sued local authorities demanding an end to overcrowding at the Pre-Trial Detention Center , and the county signed a consent decree committing to improving conditions and building a new facility.
In 1985 Rene Turolla, president of the Citizen Crime Commission launched her own investigation into warehousing of the mentally ill at the detention center. 21 years later, believes things have changed, for the worse.
?There are more people in the jail today than when I even wrote this report,? she said. ?I cannot believe it, I am so shocked, really, I am so shocked. ?
In fact, nearly all the problems the inmates told the I-Team about have been documented for years.
On the I-Team?s visit to the facility, many inmates were concerned about open sores on their naked bodies. ?There are so many infectious diseases in here you wouldn?t believe it,? one said.
Tom Mullen is an advocate for the mentally ill and director of a Miami crisis intervention
Halfway house that is an alternative to Floor 9.
?They're human beings dammit, and they have a right to live with a certain amount of equality, of quality of care,? he said.
And some experts believe it could be available. Despite the volatile overcrowding at the jail, rooms and beds go unused just minutes away at a secure treatment facility specializing in care for the mentally ill who have been arrested. Some advocates say it?s an example of bureaucratic red tape holding help hostage.
?And here we have a facility right now, that has 38 beds and can only use 16, because of the rules and laws that they have put in,? said Turolla.
Conditions on Floor 9 are expected to get worse. Recent changes in Medicaid are reducing benefits to the tune of tens of millions of dollars according to Leifman and backlogging help for the most in need. Inmates with mental illness now must navigate the HMO system in order to be treated.
Judge Leifman said, ?As you can see hey are just horribly, horribly overcrowded and they are just shuffling people around the best they can. And these changes in Medicaid and the backlog of the hospital are exacerbating an already crisis situation.?
While local dollars are now earmarked for a psychiatric treatment facility for inmate, the doors are not slated to be open for another two years. The need is immediate, but advocates for the mentally ill are forced to wait.
?We are stuck for a while. I don?t have an easy answer,? Judge Leifman said. ?We are going to need money for treatment. We can?t do it overnight. And we can?t just put these people back on the street. It?s going to put them and the community at risk. And we are not going to put the community at risk.?
Meanwhile, Earley, whose own son was diagnosed with mental illness in college and ended up in jail, wonders what it will take to end the nightmare at Floor 9.
?All those people on the 9th floor have parents. Maybe they gave up on them, maybe they got burnt out, but they are human beings, and they deserve our compassion and they deserve better than what they are getting and the people of Miami are better than what that jail shows.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
