Experts say the device is safe if used correctly, but some former jail staff and incarcerated people are concerned it’s used punitively and without enough oversight.
by Juliette Rihl
Each time Kimberly Andrews was strapped to a restraint chair, the process was the same.
Allegheny County Jail staff wheeled the chair up to her cell on the women’s acute mental health unit. They strapped down her arms and legs, fastened her hands and feet. Then they took her to the jail’s intake department, placed a spit hood over her head, and positioned the chair facing the wall, padlocked next to a toilet. “And they leave you there for as long as they want to leave you there,” 21-year-old Andrews remembers.
Andrews estimates she’s been in the restraint chair at least half a dozen times between 2018 and 2020. Once, she was placed in the chair for at least eight hours, according to a court complaint against the jail. Another time, she says she was strapped to the chair naked, save for a stiff green blanket that soon fell down. Unable to pull the blanket up, she was left exposed while staff members and other incarcerated people walked past her cell. “They’re just looking at me naked,” she remembered. “That’s humiliating and devastating and traumatic as fuck.”
Andrews is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, PTSD, anxiety disorder and oppositional defiant disorder and has attempted suicide six times while incarcerated at the jail for misdemeanor charges, according to the complaint.
According to her, every time she was placed in the chair, it was the result of a mental health crisis. She feels the restraint chair was used as a substitute for adequate mental health services. “That’s mainly all I asked for was to talk. ‘Can I talk to somebody? I have a problem,’” she remembers. “And it always escalated to the chair.”
Doctors and correctional experts agree that the chair can be a useful tool for keeping people from harming themselves, and the jail’s policy states it is never to be used punitively. Yet according to some former medical employees, people who have been in the chair and three lawsuits against jail officials, the chair is sometimes used as punishment at Allegheny County Jail, with little discretion and without mental health oversight.
Kimberly Andrews outside of the Allegheny County Jail (photo by Jay Manning/PublicSource)
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