Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill

Chapter 9. Coercive Drugging

Chapter Nine
Coercive Drugging “I was a zombie.” Introduction For the overwhelming majority of the battered women defendants in this study, the homicide arrest was their first experience with interrogation , arraignment, and/or commitment to a county jail facility. Frightened, confused, and often traumatized from a recent beating and their own lethal actions, women report that confinement in county jail was more trying than subsequent confinement in state prison. One recurrent criticism that arises from their jail time is the use of prescription drugs—antidepressants and mood-regulators— as ordered by jail medical staff. The use of psychotropic medication is common throughout most American correctional institutions and it has been criticized for its function as a form of institutional social control (Shaw 1982). In comparing men’s and women’s penal institutions, McCorkel (1996, 171) finds that “women’s institutions rely on the prescription of psychotropic drugs (e.g., tranquilizers) to restrict and control inmate behavior.” Genders and Player (1987) report that British penal institutions administer antidepressants, sedatives, and tranquilizers five times more often to women than to men. In a study of women lifers, Jose (1985) observes, Psychotropic drugs are given to women who complain about depression or misbehave in the institution, in order to “help them” control their problems (and then these women are half asleep and walk around like patients in a mental hospital ). (191) 95 According to Culliver, “The use of psychotropic drugs is 10 times higher in female prisons than in male prisons” (1993, 404). Even when medical and psychological conditions are taken into account, McCorkel (1996) reports that women prisoners are still at least twice as likely as men to be prescribed psychotropic drugs. One California woman prisoner began an advocacy group, Women Prisoners Convicted by Drugging, after being forced by jail staff to take a combination of Valium, Vistaril, Robaxin (a muscle relaxant ), Elavil, Benadryl, Phenargan (a sedative), and Tylenol with codeine, dispensed four times daily. (Auerhahn and Leonard 2000, 606) Chalke (1978) addresses the ethical problems facing prison psychiatrists in their use of chemical restraints on prisoners, raising the issue of drug treatment for the purpose of controlling individuals. Inmate-author Jack Henry Abbott (1981, 42–43) bases his condemnation of mood-altering medications in prison on his personal experiences with “institutional drugs:” They are phenothiazine drugs, and include Mellaril, Thorazine , Stelazine, Haldol. . . . These drugs, in this family, do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. . . . The drugs turn your nerves in upon yourself. Against your will, your resistance, your resolve are directed at your own tissues, your own muscles, reflexes, etc. These drugs are designed to render you so totally involved with yourself physically that all you can do is concentrate your entire being on holding yourself together. (Tying your shoes, for example.) You cannot cease trembling. . . . Those who need the drugs, who are ill, do not experience it the way we do. . . . [Y]ou are handed over to a “psychiatrist,” who doesn’t even look at you and who orders you placed on one of these drugs. (emphasis in original) More than a decade later, based on his observations as a prison inmate , Hassine (1996, 79) offers this explanation for the generous use of psychotropic drugs: The reasoning seemed to be that every dose of medication taken by an inmate equaled one less fraction of a guard 96 Convicted Survivors needed to watch that inmate, and one less inmate who may pose a threat to anyone other than himself. Hence, overcrowding had brought about a merging of the psychiatric and corrections communities. In addition to correctional institutions, nursing homes have come under scrutiny and criticism for their use of chemical restraints; recommendations have been made to move nursing homes and longterm care facilities toward a reduced or restraint-free environment (see Braun and Lipson 1993; U.S. Congress 1991). Narratives One woman’s comments reveal the promise of psychological escape through drug treatment. She also exposes the trial advantage that comes to those who receive bail. When I was first arrested, they put me on drugs. They said I needed them—the doctor that was there. At that time, you want anything that will make you sleep. You don’t want to think about what’s happening. And everyone sleeps all day and all night. They do it by getting on to the drugs. I continued to stay on that drug (Mellaril? I don’t remember what...