A recent story in The Guardian, ‘The system failed her’: behind a suicide spike at a California women’s prison, published on May 10, 2016, highlights how, according the to story, “poor mental health care is causing preventable deaths at the California Institution for Women.”
RBGG’s Mike Bien is quoted in the article, “
“Michael Bien, a lead attorney in Coleman v Brown, an ongoing lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), said: ‘Once you start using segregation for suicide watch, you’ve lost.'”
The article later goes on to say:
“Bien, who has been working to improve mental health care conditions in CDCR facilities for over a decade, points to a host of reasons for the spike in suicides: ‘Overcrowding, understaffing and ineffective management and supervision all contribute.’ He adds that CDCR has had appropriate procedures for mental health care and suicide prevention for some time, but ‘it has not been able to successfully train and implement the policies in a consistent way’.”