Grantee Profile

Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD)

Members and staff of RIPPD at a rally at New York's City Hall. In front, left to right, co-directors Mary Dougherty and Lisa Ortega. Click to enlarge.

On September 24, 2008, Iman Morales's mother called 911 because her son, a 35-year-old man with a mental illness, would not open the door to his apartment. Iman was having a bad reaction to a new psychiatric medication. When the police broke down his door, Morales ran onto his fire escape and then out to a ledge. Despite the fact that Morales was naked and "armed" only with a florescent light bulb tube, an officer tasered him. The police made no attempt to break his fall, even though Oman's mother begged them to put down an airbag. Morales hit the pavement face first and died shortly afterwards at the hospital from serious head trauma.

For the members of Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD), this tragedy underscores the NYPD's blatant lack of training and understanding of how to respond to encounters involving people with mental illnesses. Without the skills to de-escalate such situations, officers' aggressive techniques often end up making it worse -- sometimes gravely worse.

Not all incidents end in death or injury; however, the police often arrest and jail people with mental illnesses in crisis situations. Not able to follow the jail's rules, many are held for longer than their original sentence. Some are even escalated to the state prison system.

"The bottom line," explains Mary Dougherty, co-coordinator of RIPPD, "is that the criminal justice system is set up to target vulnerable populations such as people with mental illnesses." Of the 14,000 inmates at Rikers Island, 4000 have a mental illness or a mental health caseload. In the state prison system, 50 percent of inmates have some kind of psychiatric disability. According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch report, U.S. jails and prisons have become the nation's de facto mental health care providers, and New York City's Rikers Island has become one of the country's largest psychiatric facilities.

Heather Barr, a lawyer with Urban Justice Center, founded RIPPD as a community organizing force to respond to this criminalization of mental illnesses. "She was seeing lots of people with mental illnesses in local jails and in the state prison system," says Mary. "But no one was effectively pushing to examine why people with mental illnesses were ending up in prison, and what we could do to prevent it."

Big Wins

RIPPD members are primarily people with psychiatric disabilities who have encountered the criminal justice system. The organization's  membership also includes family members and friends of people with psychiatric disabilities. Early on in the group's formation, a funder told the founders that it was impossible to organize this constituency. "Maybe their family members," he told them. But not psychiatric patients themselves.

But their successes in the last seven years show how wrong he was.

One of RIPPD's early victories was the creation of the Queens Mental Health Court, which allows judges to divert individuals with mental illnesses from jail and into alternatives-to-incarceration programs.

In 2006, RIPPD members were instrumental in convincing the Republican-controlled State Senate to pass legislation banning the use of solitary confinement for people with serious mental illness in New York State prisons (known as the Special Housing Unit, or "SHU bill"). In 2008, Governor Patterson signed the bill, which will go into effect in 2011.

Working in coalition with other criminal justice reform and neighborhood groups, RIPPD has also helped to blocked several jail proposals in the South Bronx. Most recently, they helped defeat a proposal for a jail near the fish market in Hunt's Point. Thanks to their organizing, the Department of Correction officially stated that no new jails would be built in the Bronx. 

"This is for me"

RIPPD has succeeded in their work because, as Mary puts it simply, "We accept people for who they are and where they're at." There are no conditions that members must meet in order to be involved.  "We say, be who you are and we can work together as a group. We highlight their strengths."

At RIPPD, members have a full voice. Each month, they analyze their organizing landscape together and decide on the issues that they want to work on. They discuss possible approaches and outcomes, choose their plan of action, and divide up the work. Whether it's a meeting with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly or a rally in the Bronx, the members lead the charge.

While RIPPD is proud of their achievements, this process has been just as important. "People ask us, does it matter if your people are sitting at the table if you still get the law changed?" says Lisa Ortega, co-coordinator of RIPPD.  "To us it matters. We don't want to skip that process. We don't want the law changed without our people sitting at the table. Organizing is more than just the tasks at hand and the projected outcomes, it is also about the process that empowers members. So we consider the leadership development of members as an important of a victory as any of our policy or campaign wins. Including people directly affected keeps them involved and makes for sounder, more sustainable policy solutions."

David Newton, a long-time RIPPD member, explains it best, as he describes a meeting with then-Governor Pataki about the SHU bill. The SHU bill stopped the practice of putting imprisoned psychiatric patients into solitary confinement. According to David: "When I was a kid growing up and I'd seen all the changes coming up through civil rights, I never thought I'd be sitting up to the table to tell a governor that he's got to make a change." RIPPD's organizing process allowed him to look the governor in the eye and say, "This is for me."

Because RIPPD prioritizes political education, members come to see their situations in a new way. They realize their circumstances are not unique, they are not alone, and that in coming together with others, they can make systemic change.

North Star funding makes a difference

North Star began funding RIPPD in 2007, and Mary says the support has made a huge impact on their work. "North Star is one of the few foundations that has deep knowledge of organizing," she says. "It's great to be funded by a group that really understands what we're doing, and helps us to think more deeply about our approach."

Becoming a North Star grantee has given RIPPD access to many other funding streams in New York City and beyond because, "North Star is recognized in the funding world as an extremely legitimate and powerful foundation," says Mary.

Crisis Intervention Teams Save Lives

RIPPD's current focus is on getting the NYPD to implement Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) -- specially trained personnel who can respond to 911 crisis calls that involve people with mental illnesses. These teams would be made up of peer specialists (a person recovering from mental illness who is trained to assist others with mental illnesses), mental health workers, and police officers. They have proven successful in many major cities, increasing the safety of both people with mental illnesses and officers and decreasing the number of arrests of people with mental illnesses by diverting them to treatment. It also provides community accountability. "The key to a successful Crisis Intervention Team is that people in the community who are most affected by this issue have a role in creating these teams and ensuring their effectiveness," explains Lisa.

In 2008 RIPPD brought together experts and people directly affected by this issue to discuss how Crisis Intervention Teams could best be implemented in NYC. It was also an opportunity to put pressure on invited policy makers to commit to implementing CITs. With the death of Iman Morales, RIPPD decided to focus their energies on the 79th Precinct in Bed-Stuy, where the incident occurred. While the commanding officer was open to the idea of CITs, nothing could be done without approval by Commissioner Ray Kelly.

In fact, RIPPD had been trying - unsuccessfully - to meet with Ray Kelly since its inception. Letters, phone calls, protests outside of 1 Police Plaza: None of these efforts worked. But  in July, 2010,  RIPPD members attended a criminal justice conference hosted by the Manhattan District Attorney's office in which Kelly was the keynote speaker. The conference was titled "Communities & Justice: Partnerships & Challenges for the 21st Century'' -- an apt name for what happened. "We used the conference as an opportunity to corner him and demand that he meet with us to discuss CITs. Two weeks later we arranged a meeting with his executive staff," says Lisa. She went on to say that, "Getting a meeting with 1 Police Plaza was a part of a long organizing process and a huge step forward in our campaign."

As a result of their long-fought for meeting with Kelly, RIPPD is now drafting a detailed proposal that would show how a CIT could work in an individual precinct.  They will present this proposal in the coming months, as well as forming a physical team ready to begin working with the NYPD.

RIPPD hopes that with the implementation of CITs, tragedies such as the death of Iman Morales can be avoided. "Lives can be saved with CITs," says Mary. "People will be responding to crisis calls who understand that this is not a dangerous person. It's a person in need."