County Jail Inmate Is Fitted With Hockey Helmet To Keep From Gouging Out Eye

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jul 22, 2014 4:35PM

Photo via Cook County Sheriff's Office handout.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has been vocal about how city and county closures of mental health centers have placed an undue strain on the county jail, where many inmates suffer from mental health issues and are no longer able to get treatment.

Here’s the latest harrowing example. Corrections officers at Cook County Jail had to fit a schizophrenic inmate with a hockey mask and padded mitts to keep from gouging out his eye. The inmate, who suffers from extreme visions from his condition, previously ripped his other eye out while in a California jail on a parole violation before being transferred back to Cook County. Dart told Fox News Chicago, “This is one of those cases where you're left saying what more do you have to do to show the public that this is so messed up what we’re doing here.”

Dart called jails and prisons “the new insane asylums” in an October 2013 report on CBS’ 60 Minutes and bemoaned the irony of closing mental health facilities while letting the jail swell with inmates who need serious attention for their mental issues; roughly 30 percent of Cook County Jail’s population suffer from mental illness. “The irony is so deep that you have a society that finds it wrong to have people warehoused in state mental institutions but those very same people were OK if we warehouse them in a jail,” Dart said at the time.

Dart and community leaders are working on ways to address the problem, including securing funding to create community-based mental health centers to get the mentally ill the help they deserve. Reverend Robert Spicer of Community Justice for Youth Institute, said:

”We believe with the help of the churches, the synagogues, faith communities, community-based organization citizens and just average citizens of the city of Chicago, we can begin to build a passage around how we build peace in this city and how we move people from being punished for their illnesses, which I think is wrong to now bringing them into a right relationship with the community and getting the help that they need.”

Dart added, “Under most analysis from the professionals I've talked to, this is the secret to success, is to help people to get treatment in the community, so they don't end up in our jails.”