Bizarre Prison Procedure
Forced Thorazine to place inmates in a Full Body Plaster Cast
Others who were more violently suicidal were treated to one of the most bizarre procedures in prison history, a plaster body cast from neck to ankles, with holes for defecation and urination. This restraint was developed in 1978 by the penitentiary's medical director as an alternative to drug therapy. As he explained to the team of forensic consultants, he thought it was "probably more humane to physically restrain people" than to make them suffer the affects of some tranquilizers. His premise is voided by the fact that Thorazine had to be forced down a fit-throwing convict's throat to get him into the body cast. Dr. Orner spoke about his use of these casts at a meeting of the American Medical Association's Conference on Health Services in Correctional Facilities in November of 1979. He told his audience that he was using body casts as a method of crisis intervention. "And he did it in almost a bragging tone—he sounded like he thought it was terrific," one listener, an attorney with the New York Legal Aid Society, commented. "I asked him how he got people into it, considering that they would be supposedly violent people in some kind of episode, and he said that if it took six officers, eight officers, it didn't matter how many it took to hold the guy down." But according to an interview with an ex-inmate who was placed in a body cast in the summer of 1979, it was Thorazine, not guards, that subdued him:
I was brought down to the hospital in handcuffs, and thrown off into the strip cell a number of times. Finally they upped and stuffed me off in that oP cast situation… But before they did that, they poured Thorazine down my throat. Held my jaws right there, and just poured it right in my face because I didn't want to take it. Well.. .after I got in that full body cast, I busted all out of that, man, because I was hysterical. Scared. Somebody's trying to kill me…"
From: The Hate Factory A First-Hand Account of the 1980 Riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, page 65, ISBN-10: 0-595-36669-4 (pbk) by Georgelle Hirliman.
