Inside Baldwin State Prison
In prison terms, the world beyond the bleak brick walls and razor wire-topped fences of Baldwin State Prison in Milledgeville is called the “free world.”
When new inmates are transported to the facility, they are first sent to diagnostics. Here they undergo several tests checking for mental and medical defects. They are also assigned to the prison and dorm that will become their home for as long as their sentence holds.
There are three dorms for mentally ill inmates at Baldwin State: K2, K3 and K4. K2 houses the more severe cases. K3 houses the less severe cases and K4 houses the least severe cases. Inmates sent to K3 are placed in the care of mental health counselor and GCSU alumna Stacie Wade.
Wade always had an interest in mental health, but began college studying biology at Georgia Tech.
“I wanted to go into genetics, but I realized I talk far too much to spend the rest of my life in a lab by myself,” Wade said.
In 2002, Wade received her undergraduate degree in psychology from GCSU. She went on to earn her master’s in clinical psychology at Argosy University in Atlanta. Wade began her career at Baldwin State Prison in August 2004.
Warden Vanessa O’Donnell, a soft spoken woman resembling the stereotypical image of a soccer mom rather than of the warden of a close security prison, doted on Wade’s wing.
“We’re very proud of our of our Mental Health program. It is the focal point of the institution,” O’Donnell said.
As part of her caseload, Wade has treated some very sick and dangerous men. She and the rest of the staff provide different levels of care to the inmates.
All inmates are categorized as a Level 1, 2, 3 or 4.
Level 1 inmates have no mental disability. Level 2 inmates have only slight mental disability. Level 4 inmates have severe mental illnesses and need strict around-the-clock care.
Wade treats Level 3 inmates. The Level 3 inmates are categorized as “in patients,” meaning that in the “free world” their illnesses are so severe that they would need to be hospitalized.
“We see them more frequently,” Wade said. “They have individual sessions more frequently, and their days are very structured to provide that stability they need.”
Wade’s goal for every inmate she treats is to help them stabilize their illness. She helps the inmates control their symptoms and, if medication is necessary, to be properly medicated to manage their symptoms independently.
Wade treats convicted murderers, rapists, child molesters and thieves everyday. She also treats men with schizophrenia, personality disorders, bipolar disorder and depressive disorders.
One inmate, a convicted child molester suffering from severe major depressive disorder with psychotic features, showed off his drawings hanging in a sergeant’s office.
“I feel I’ve come a long way,” the man said. “I used to be an ornery little critter, but not now, thanks to Miss Wade.”
Wade says the greatest challenge in her job is that these criminal and mentally ill minds are one and the same.
“One of the problems I do have consistently in treating the people that I treat is you have to reconcile what they’ve done with the actual person, and you also have to separate the two,” Wade said. “If you have someone whose primary problem stems from child abuse, they may be in prison for killing someone. You have to keep that in consideration, but also treat them as a person and not just as a criminal.”
While Wade’s job is difficult, it is apparent why she does it.
“I like the interaction with people,” she says. “I may be a little morbid, but I really do like the more severe cases. And I like knowing that even if someone has a lot of problems, you can still help, even if it’s just a little bit.”
Wade has treated hundreds of inmates over the years, and occasionally, her dedication to civil service pays off.
“I had one a few years ago, a severe self-mutilator. He had a combination psychotic and mood disorder. It was always difficult for him to differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t,” Wade recalled. “He would injure himself severely; he had to have reconstructive surgery several times. He’d broken bones, he’d cut himself, and he cut his Achilles tendon. He’d swallow things that had to be removed from his stomach because they wouldn’t pass through.
“When he first came to us, he had been cutting about once every week. He was with us a little over a year. By the time he left us, he had not cut in about four months,” Wade continued. “There were a lot of factors that helped him, and I like to think that me working with him was one of them. But he was also on medication, and he was at a point where he was willing to change, and therefore therapy was much more effective.”
Wade laughed as she recalled the same inmate jokingly asking her to throw cheeseburgers to him over the fence. She remembered him saying he would swear “they just fell from the sky.”
“He was so much fun to work with; he was absolutely hilarious,” Wade said.
Wade’s modesty would never allow her to say so, but her passion for the people she treats is apparent, as is her adamant stance on issues such as the lack of resources available for the mentally ill.
“The reason there are so many people in the prison system that are mentally ill is hospitals don’t have the funding anymore to care for these people and the courts know that. People who are mentally ill a lot of times will be arrested for more minor things and will be given longer sentences for more minor things because the courts know they will get treatment in prison,” Wade said.
According to Wade, the Department of Corrections is the largest provider of mental health services in the country.
“It is incredibly unfair to half of these people,” she said, “because they should be in a hospital or should have been in a hospital prior to the crime. But those resources just aren’t available.”
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that over one in three state prisoners, one in four federal prisoners, and one in six jail inmates with a mental health problem received treatment after their admission.
Wade also protests the common misconceptions the general public harbors toward the mentally ill.
“The popular idea is that if somebody has, say, schizophrenia, then obviously they’re going to try to kill someone -not true,” Wade said. “The percentage of someone with a mental illness committing a violent crime against someone else is actually less than someone who doesn’t have one.”
The public’s concept of prison life is what Wade calls “skewed.”
“One of the things people say when coming to the prison for the first time, almost universally, is, ‘This is nothing like I thought it was going to be.’ What you see on movies are enormously muscled men covered in tatt
oos walking around half dressed lifting weights. And that absolutely does not happen,” she said.
Wade says, for the most part, the inmates are very polite.
“My mother is a high school teacher and my case load is better behaved than her class,” Wade says.
She does warn, however, that the profession is not for the faint of heart.
“For people interested in this line of work, find out about it before you get into it. Definitely do an internship but definitely get some experience in it before you decide it’s what you want to do,” Wade said. “We had a counselor start on a Monday, everything peachy, going fine. We came in Thursday morning, and she had managed to sneak all the stuff out of her office. She had quit and left.”
Wade advises that nothing can prepare one better for the profession than real world experience.
“You can read every book about psychosis and hallucinations, but to actually be sitting there with that person and trying to talk them out of killing themselves, while the voices are telling them to kill themselves, is an entirely different setting,” she said. “It is difficult, but if it’s what you’re good at, it can be very rewarding.”
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Apr 25 2008. Filed under Features.
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