As a result of his stay, John Doe was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault after one of the psychiatric nurses called the police on him. To be clear, a psychiatric nurse, in a psychiatric hospitalization setting, called the police on his own patient, who was exhibiting signs of mental health distress. Sadly, this is all too common.

To date, John’s case is still pending in Hartford, a year and a half later. John was subjected to what’s called a 54-56d examination and forced to attend meetings with the Office of Forensic Evaluator to determine whether or not he was “competent” to stand trial which, in Connecticut’s particular legal parlance, means whether he could recognize the different court personnel, knew the facts that were being alleged, could understand the court system itself, and could help an attorney prepare a defense.

His appointed attorney, a contractor with the office of the public defender, applied him for Connecticut’s Supervised Diversionary Program, which is designed for individuals that have mental health issues that cause the underlying behaviors complained of in a criminal case.

Since the initial arrest, John has been unable to work. He has been ordered to take medications that he doesn’t want to take. What John experienced – and continues to experience – is merely one example of the numerous cases where individuals in psychiatric hospitalization settings are charged with crimes, through the collusion of psych nurses and police. In 2022, this number was estimated to be 1,948 (according to the Connecticut Hospital Association) out of the roughly 5,532 “violent incidents” that occurred across the state that year according to the Connecticut Senate Democrats, meaning that over one third of “violent incidents” reported in Connecticut that year were psychiatric patients interacting with psych nurses or other hospital staff.

In that same year, Black people in Connecticut were arrested at a rate of 5.3 times higher than white people; they were the victims of crimes at a rate of 3.2 times higher than white people. Those arrested were disproportionately poor, and those who were convicted and incarcerated where even more so. Despite making up only 12% of the state population, Black people constitute roughly 45% of its prisoners. There are presently 10,698 incarcerated people in the state, which leaves us with almost 5,000 Black prisoners of a Black population of roughly 500,000 – 1% of the entire Black population of Connecticut is currently in prison. One out of every five Black boys today is expected to go to prison at some point in their life.

Nurses and Police: Bedfellows in Class Warfare

Nurses are petty bourgeois professionals. Despite the fact that they work to support themselves, they are required to obtain an advanced nursing degree and to pass through a guild-style board system in order to be permitted to practice. Registered nurses in Connecticut make a median salary of $102,740 per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We can assume that most are owners of real property, given this income rate. All of this is reflected in their petty bourgeois class consciousness and the way they behave around and with police.

Indeed, nurses and police often work together as a team, particularly in acute psychiatric facilities. Studies have shown that nurses and police “develop a trusting, respectful alliance” in the psychiatric setting, according to “Nurse-Police Coalition,” a scholarly article in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services (Vol. 52, No. 9). A Canadian study in the Archives of Psychiatric Nursing (Vol. 35, Is. 5) found that “all nurses saw police officers as fellow colleagues.”

Nurses are integrated into the system of property and property-maintenance through their petty bourgeois class background, which is itself partially the result of the western settler-colonial system. However, this petty bourgeois consciousness is not the necessary outcome of their class position and they could, if there were a decolonial mass organization capable of acting as an anchor, be persuaded to break with the police.

As it stands, however, nurses are in league with the police; they are an adjunct arm of the system that protects property and the “property rights” of the owning classes. When it comes to mental health arrests, many nurses do not take seriously their duty to the patients, but rather, like police, prioritize their own convenience and passing mental and physical welfare over that of their patients. In instances of mental health prosecutions, nurses cease acting as caregivers, and take on the role of Junior G-man in a prosecution.

Targeting the Vulnerable

Those subject to arrests because of mental health crises are among the people least capable of fighting back. Someone who is arrested in a mental health crisis is already likely to have limited access to resources; if they had more resources, they would rarely be placed in a position to be arrested in the first place. Private treatment facilities discourage the intervention of police; money smooths over many problems.

Of those who are arrested, those who continue to be prosecuted are once again those without resources. After an arrest, if someone with mental health problems can show a stable housing situation, good income, and what lawyers often call evidence that they are “productive members of society,” the prosecutions are frequently dropped or blunted. Those who continue to have housing insecurity, job insecurity, and are not “productive members of society” – which can be read as either workers capable of being exploited or exploiters capable of doing exploitation – their prosecutions continue unabated.

Managing mental health crises would require putting resources toward a social system of care. There is no comprehensive system to assist those who are suffering from either acute or long-term mental health crises. Like most everything else in the US, the management of mental health is left to private corporations as a source of profit. This means that anyone who does not have the free resources to be extracted by a treatment corporation is left to fend for themselves and that when crises do occur, they’re shuttled into overloaded treatment centers where they are treated as pieces of meat in a packaging system or simply arrested. If and when they object to such treatment in these overcrowded hospitals and facilities, or if and when their mental health crisis manifests in a fashion that is less palatable, particularly when they’re Black, the police become the mental health system of last reserve. This, despite the fact that there really is no system of first reserve.

Dismantle the Criminal Mental Health System

This is a front in the class war, and one that is particularly acute in and among communities of the nationally oppressed. The cry must be taken up against the collusion between psychiatric treatment facilities and the police; to continue to subject those among us who are in crisis and need help to a punitive system designed to extract money (through court fees and criminal fines), break up labor solidarity (through imprisonment), and protect property (through prosecuting low-level property crimes directly, or by physically removing and warehousing those members of society whose presence is uncomfortable for the propertied elements, thus improving the property values) is itself a crime.

If you’re a Connecticut resident who wants to be heard in the fight against this two-sided system where nurses feed mental health patients in to the meat grinder of the criminal legal machine, please reach out to Hartford Community Legal Aid, care of the Sonthonax Institute, at sonthonaxinstitute@gmail.com or call us at 401-215-0375.

We are fighting for a better tomorrow.