16-year-old arrested, held for 3 years in prison, 400 days in solitary confinement.....no conviction

[struggle4progress]

58. I don't know for sure but I wonder if what happened there might have been related

to the results of the Rosenhan experiment "On being sane in insane places" -- in which normal volunteers checked into a psychiatric hospital, claiming pre-admission to hear voices saying "hollow" or "thud" but acting completely normally post-admission: institutional staff then interpreted many of these pseudo-patients' activities as evidence of psycho-pathology

Evidently, it can be extraordinarily difficult for institutional staff to distance themselves from their own preconceptions

So if one landed in jail and then found oneself forever in limbo through someone else's mistake, one might need to be an extraordinarily effective self-advocate to gain a sympathetic ear from low-paid not-well-trained over-worked jail staff: they might be inclined to presume in many interactions that the prisoner is a maladjusted liar with poor self control -- and a prisoner's own lack of education, or social marginality, or poor self control would only reinforce such staff presumptions

But, yeah, you're right: citizens ought to be able to expect the officials who run the lock-up to keep better tabs on the population, and certainly somebody who interacted with him should have asked why he was there so long. And, of course, that wasn't a harmless "oops! -- there there are scads of serious constitutional violations there