Prison doctor, heal thyself
From Mr and Mrs Paul Edwards Sir: As the parents of a prisoner, we suggest Theodore Dalrymple's characterisation of prisoners as members of a brutalised sub- class (`Killing time', 12 February) is as accurate as the characterisation of prison doctors as those who are not good enough to get a job anywhere else.
Our son was an honours graduate, the son of middle-class, Spectator-reading par- ents, and not given to violence, sex, drugs or alcohol. He did, however, suffer from mental illness which led him to cause a breach of the peace for which he was remanded to prison for three days. There he was required to share a cell with another graduate from a middle-class family who had been much more severely mentally ill for several years. Within eight hours of entering prison our son had been beaten and kicked to death by his cellmate.
Our son's tragedy and a high level of sui- cides in prison reflect gross failures of Care in the Community; the preference of many `You be Railtrack, I'll be Great Western.' psychiatrists to send their most difficult cases to prison rather than to hospital; and inadequate care, particularly mental health care, in prisons. Figures published by the Prison Service show that 66 per cent of remand prisoners and 39 per cent of sen- tenced prisoners suffer some form of men- tal illness; that the level of serious mental disorder is much higher in prison than in a similar age/gender population in the wider community; that 75 per cent of those suf- fering mental illness are not identified at prison reception, and the chances of being identified later are very small.
A suicide in prison every four days should not, as Dalrymple suggests, be explained away as an acceptable hazard of life in the sub-classes but recognised as a shameful indictment of the failures of the mental health services, the medical profes- sion and the prison service. Professionals who seek to excuse their own failures by blaming the victims of those failures should not, we suggest, be allowed to promote their misanthropic self-justification through the columns of The Spectator.
Paid and Audrey Edwards
9 Myneer Park, Coggeshall, Essex
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