Sarah Stillman
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, Mary, like many of the people I wrote about for this piece, was a very vibrant and very loved person. She had a life with two kids who she loved dearly. She was always the kind of very nurturing mother who would sew their Halloween costumes by hand. And at some point as she got older, she developed some serious mental health issues and slid into addiction.
I think it's a story that many, many people can relate to. And shockingly, by the time she was in her 60s, she often found herself unhoused. And she actually wound up in the Pima County Jail because of a probation violation tied essentially to being unhoused because she had to register her address and she didn't have one.
She had struggled with schizophrenia and she had a diagnosis also of bipolar disorder. So very common things that so many families struggle with.
Yeah, her son Carlin was completely shocked. He saw a woman who looked utterly different than when he had last seen her just a few months before. She was essentially just, as he described it, skin and bones. She was extremely thin. She was wearing a diaper.
She just was unrecognizable and looked like she had aged many years, which, of course, prompted the question for him of, like, what on earth happened to you? And he decided he was going to investigate and try to get to the bottom of it.
So they really started digging into the jail conditions. And what they found is that many people who have mental health disorders, including Mary, when they're put in these kinds of conditions, they become really terrified and sometimes have fears that their jailers are trying to poison them and they cease to eat.
And so Mary, although when she had arrived, she had immediately articulated that she is someone who needs psychiatric medications, at least as far as we understand it from the documents. But she didn't receive those, didn't receive at the start any chance to see a psychiatrist or get the kind of treatment that she needed and waited quite some time for that.
Again, mind you, she's waiting there actually pre-trial, like the vast majority of the people that arrived. I reported on for this piece and wound up not being brought to many of her jail hearings because of the fact that she had psychologically decompensated, which was actually how this piece was initially pitched to me.
The attorneys had brought it to me saying many, many people are being deprived of their civil rights by virtue of the fact that they're being detained pre-trial for things they haven't even yet been found guilty of and then not being brought to their court hearings because they're They're having mental health issues that they're not being treated for in the jail.
And so people in the jail are determining that they can't even bring them to the hearing to get them out. Because so many of these people had charges that ultimately would have been dropped, as was ultimately the case for Mary when a judge saw her months later looking emaciated.
So ultimately, the very sad reality that I didn't know when I began reporting this is that if you've not eaten for many months or been dehydrated for many months, oftentimes medically you can't fully be revived. So the doctors met and made the decision that there was nothing that could actually bring Mary back to capacity and decided she could be released to hospice care to die.
So ultimately, the autopsy ruled it a death by protein calorie malnutrition, as you said. Which was a term I'd never heard. I mean, the really sad thing for me in reporting this was just learning so many of these terms that pertain to people who, because of being malnourished or dehydrated in the jails, died of a whole slew of causes that could have been so easily prevented.
Unlike, you know, I think so often about we've heard about police violence of the sort that happens in an instant or in a moment. Like we think about George Floyd. And then I also now have a new category in my brain.
That's these types of deaths that happen across many weeks or months even where everyone is looking and seeing a person grow more and more frail and not take their food trays day after day and still be allowed essentially to waste away.
Yeah, it's a big set of intersecting histories, I think, because we've got the big history of deinstitutionalization. So people may be familiar with the idea that for a long time, many Americans who were struggling with mental health issues were held in psychiatric facilities that were often also very heinous conditions without the right kind of treatment.
And there was a rightful outcry about that. And then Instead of finding a genuine solution to the problem, what we decided to do as a country is make a big sweeping promise that we would take people out of these facilities and then provide actual mental health care in communities. And then that type of community care never really got resourced.
And instead, what we did is take off on the trajectory of mass incarceration. So seeing the increase of criminalizing people for being poor, criminalizing people for their addictions.
And so at that same time that we saw many, many people released from these psychiatric asylums that had been abusive, they basically just got re-swept up in the net of county jails and prisons and other places that weren't really well equipped to heal or even remotely address the realities of mental health.
Exactly. And I think many people don't know about the difference between a prison and a jail. A jail typically having been designed to be a short passing through space while you're either serving out a short sentence or awaiting trial.
And what we've seen also in this time period is just a massive surge in pretrial detention, people waiting sometimes not just months, but literally years just to have their day in court and people with mental health issues waiting.
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