Updated:2024-12-11 02:33 Views:74
In 2016, Marchell Taylor lay in his windowless, six-by-eight cell in the Denver County Jail. Only 36 days after being released after serving time for drug and robbery convictions, he robbed a Papa John’s and assaulted an employee. Because of his record, Mr. Taylor faced 300 years of imprisonment. He asked himself: Why am I back here?
Answering his question may require looking back to 1978, when he was 9 years old and his family’s car slammed into a wall. He woke up to blood on his face. The brain injury he sustained went untreated. Shortly after that, his behavior changed, and he became, in his words, “snappy and violent.” By age 10, he was regularly turning to marijuana and alcohol. At 13, he was breaking into houses. At 14, he robbed a 7-Eleven. In 1993 he was picked up for aggravated robbery and ended up in a maximum security facility. For the next two decades, Mr. Taylor was in and out of institutions like this.
That is until the Brain Injury Alliance of Colorado diagnosed him with a brain injury in 2016 while he was awaiting trial. After administering a screening, psychologists at the Men’s Mental Health Transition Unit — a pioneering mental health program in the Denver County Jail — gave Mr. Taylor access to therapies for mental health, including cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which helps process traumatic memories and experiences. These treatments taught him about his brain, and he says it has made all the difference.
It is tempting to dismiss brain injury at an early age as the cause of years of criminal behavior. It’s certainly true in Mr. Taylor’s case that there were other contributing factors, including ongoing substance abuse, a lack of money and weak social and psychological support. But after spending years researching brain injuries in an effort to understand my own recovery from several and as a friend of Mr. Taylor’s, I’m reckoning with the fact that experts are only now beginning to recognize the connection between brain injury and incarceration. While such trauma may not offer a tidy explanation for histories like his, growing insight into this connection offers an opportunity to change the grim legacy of incarceration and mental illness in this country by treating an underlying factor that can fuel recidivism.
It’s estimated that nearly 45 percent of people who have been involved with the American criminal justice system have a history of brain injury. Some research suggests rates of brain injury among incarcerated women are 5 to 7 percentage points higher than for incarcerated men. And an eight-year study in Flint, Mich., of ninth graders at risk of dropping out of school found that those who had sustained brain injuries in their youth were more likely to engage in violent acts as young adults.
Brain injuries often result in overwhelming feelings of disinhibition, mood swings, overreaction and even acts of rage, which can lead to criminalized behaviors. Survivors of brain injury can struggle with social interaction, skill acquisition, planning and follow-through. This can make it hard to get and maintain employment and housing. (One study in Colorado found that 71 percent of housing-insecure people surveyed reported a history of brain injury.) Brain injuries frequently go unnoticed because they are invisible — unlike, say, a broken leg — and because they often affect people who are themselves unseen. Few Americans are more invisible than those living in prisons and jails. Today the country’s largest mental health facility is not a hospital or asylum. It is part of the Los Angeles County jail system, according to the local sheriff’s department.
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