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LEAD-IN BY HOST: Treatment of mentally ill prisoners by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is being questioned by some of the people closest to the system. Valarie Torres takes a closer look:

STORY: Some experts who deal with the mentally ill in Texas prisons are questioning the quality of treatment they receive. Criticisms include a poor adherance to laws already in place outlining prisoner treatment, while others feel the state doesn't ensure proper rehabilitation.

Senior U.S. District Judge in Austin, the honorable William Wayne Justice, is experienced in dealing with mentally ill prisoners in the Texas prison system. In a historic ruling in 1980, he declared the Texas prison system unconstitutional, placing it under Federal control for the next 30 years. Justice thinks current state laws dealing with the mentally ill lack compassion and emphasize vengence:

"We have allowed the spirit of vengeance such unrivaled sway in our dealings with those who commit crime that we have ceased to consider properly whether we have taken adequate account of the role that mental impairment may play in the determination of moral responsibility. As a result, we punish those we cannot justly blame. Such result is not, I believe worthy of a civil society."

Judge Justice uses the case of Andrea Yates as an example of how the Texas Criminal Justice System fails to protect the mentally ill. Yates was sentenced to life in prison for drowning three of her five children in March of this year, despite pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

"What is appalling about the verdict in the Yates case is not that it was lawless, but that it quite properly reflects the state of the law. The criminal law is supposed to mete out just punishment in part to deter others from offending, and in part to give voice to the moral outrage of the community at heinous acts. But young men who believe that newspapers of Edinburgh are printing scandelous lies about them or that they will win a movie star's love by shooting the President, and young mothers who kill their children to save them from hell, cannot be deterred from acting as they do, because the whole idea of deterrence requires an appeal to reason. Nor can those with broken minds be blamed for actions over which they had no control. The only principle of the criminal law which can be effectuated by punishing people like these is Lex Talionis, the iron law of revenge."

A doctor and professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas-Houston, Daniel Creson, believes mental institutions housing prisoners fail to provide adequate services.

"I felt that the way sometimes the detriation of chronically ill patients was realy pretty much the result of the efforts on the part of the prison to provide certain kinds of amenities to patients that would fall into that category. When I was there there was people that were really psychotic or really having major difficulties. There was a lot of sensory isolation. They were housed in cells alone, and they looked out on to a blank wall, and had little contact except for peoples' voiced unless a guard happened to walk by. That I my view would tend to promote deteration in the psychological well-being of most people."

Cynthia Brockman's 19-year-old son, Chris Brockman, is incarcerated in the Skyview Unit with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the same unit that houses Andrea Yates. Brockman has been fighting to get proper drug treatment for her son from the doctors at the unit that work with the University of Texas Medical Branch - or UTMB, a contracted managed health care provider that oversees 80 percent of Texas prisoners.

She says the drugs doctors have prescribed for her son have severe negative side effects:

"My son took them, and he's a nineteen year old teenager and he's very intimidated by these doctors."

Public relations officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Larry Todd, doesn't think there are many problems with the quality of treatment of mentally ill offenders.

[TODD]

In June of this year, Judge William Wayne Justice settled the 30-year-old Ruiz case, ending all direct federal supervision of Texas prisons, but criticisms of the treatment of mentally ill prisoners have not gone away.

Justice continues to urge better treatment of these prisoners not only for their own sake, but also for those on the other side of the prison walls.

[Judge Justice]

Valarie Torres, KPFT News, Houston.