Did prison have to ‘be a death sentence’ for man with mental illness?
- Tim Sykes
- Apr 7
- 6 min read
When the calls from prison suddenly stopped in February 2024, Erik Ramsey’s family started worrying. Frequent communication was their way of trying to help Ramsey, 29, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, get through the time until his scheduled release in February 2026.
In isolation, Ramsey couldn’t make or receive calls. He did send a few letters full of manic ramblings that raised concerns among his loved ones.
Then came May 5, when a call just after midnight from the warden at Harnett Correctional Institution blindsided Ramsey’s family.
“Erik took his life,” Ramsey’s older brother Edward recalled the warden telling him.
“It was just a shock,” said Edward Ramsey, whose brother had been in prison for less than four months. “I hadn’t been able to talk to my brother for months … I thought I was in a dream … To this day, it’s still difficult to understand and to process that it happened.”
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By Grace Vitaglione
Lindsi Franklin’s son, Isaac, was 9 years old in June 2024 when doctors found an abscess in his stomach and a section of diseased bowel. He was diagnosed with severe Crohn’s disease — Isaac’s immune system had decided that his own intestines were an enemy.
Franklin’s insurance company required prior approval before covering the medications Isaac needed — a process that took months, Franklin said. She spent hours on the phone between the company, pharmacy and the physician.
“Time was not on our side,” said Franklin, who’s from Wake County. “Isaac’s immune system was on high alert and could continue to attack his intestines.”
Eventually, Isaac was able to get both doses of the medication he needed and two surgeries. He’s now 10 years old and back to playing soccer, she said.
But the fight with insurance isn’t over. As Isaac grows older and gains weight, the dosage for his medications will change, and the insurance company will likely put the family through the entire rigamarole — a process known as prior approval — again, she said at a news conference at the legislature held March 18.
By Trista Talton, Coastal Review Online
Without a state-set limit for 1,4-dioxane, a public utility that serves an estimated 200,000 people here will have to invest millions of dollars to remove the federally deemed “likely carcinogen” from its raw drinking water source.
The projected cost for Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, or CFPUA, to make additional upgrades to its Sweeney Water Treatment Plant is in the area of $17- $24 million, authority Executive Director Kenneth Waldroup said.
Annual additional costs associated with treating the chemical being discharged into the Cape Fear River upstream of the city are between $1 million and $3 million.
Such costs could be avoided if upstream polluters would reduce the amount of 1,4-dioxane from their effluent by 60-65%, Waldroup said.
But prospects that industry will voluntarily reduce discharges of the chemical are slim.
By Julia Tilton, Daily Yonder
Environmental justice efforts at the ten U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional offices have stopped and employees have been placed on administrative leave, per an announcement from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin earlier this month. Former EPA employees involved with environmental justice work across the country say rural communities will suffer as a result.
Before being shuttered in early March, the EPA’s environmental justice arm was aimed at making sure communities were being treated fairly and receiving their due protection under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to the EPA administrator under the Biden administration, told the Daily Yonder that this work had big implications for rural places since there are pollution concerns in rural areas across the country.
“EPA was very focused on making sure that not just on the regulatory side, but also on the investment side, we were pushing resources into rural communities,” said Hoover.
According to Hoover, most of the pollution challenges the U.S. faces are not new. He said that the employees—now on leave—who staffed the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were deeply knowledgeable on the issues affecting communities in their regions; issues which can go on for decades.
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Other Voices by editor Rose Hoban
One of the best parts of my job is to watch young reporters develop their journalistic skills and do significant work. That’s been the case for the past several months as Rachel Crumpler — our Report for America corps member who covers prison health for NC Health News — has worked on today’s lead story on the website and in this newsletter.
Rachel came to NC Health News in June 2022, fresh out of the journalism program at UNC Chapel Hill and took on this challenging topic with gusto and care. She said that she got interested in the topic of solitary confinement in prison as she started meeting sources in her first summer with us.
“I think one of the early events I went to was a panel… on solitary confinement and people sharing their experiences,” Rachel said. “That panel recommended that the prison system adopt the Nelson Mandela rules, so my ears kind of perked up.”
Since that time, Rachel started watching for trends, and she realized that many of the suicide deaths announced by North Carolina’s prison authorities were taking place in restrictive housing. She said she started to keep a spreadsheet of these instances, wondering if there was the opportunity to someday tell a larger story.
“The data show that about 60 percent of prison suicides occur in restrictive housing,” she said, noting that people in solitary confinement are only about six percent of the people in the state prison system.
One of the limitations to Rachel telling a larger story was my own lack of bandwidth to shepherd her through an intensive reporting process. So, last year, we were both pleased when NC Health News was presented with an opportunity to bring on an experienced investigative editor through a joint project with Report for America and the Investigative Editing Corps, an initiative that pairs experienced editors with small newsrooms to guide them through challenging stories. We were fortunate to be paired with Melanie Sill, who brings deep experience and deep knowledge of North Carolina, to this process. She was able to give Rachel more attention than I could and to encourage her to probe deeper and ask harder questions of our state officials.
The first story, Juvenile detention centers in NC under scrutiny for use of isolation, ran in December, 2024. Today’s story looks at last year’s jump in the number of suicides by people in solitary, highlighting the death of Erik Ramsey, a young man with psychiatric issues who tragically took his life while he was alone in a cell after his mental health had deteriorated.
“How many people with mental illness are held in restrictive housing?” Rachel asked me when I spoke to her about her reporting. “The prison system says it tries to find alternatives rather than housing someone with mental illness in restrictive housing, but clearly, it still happens.”
“You know, there’s a lot of people that will say that ‘they deserve to be in prison, why should we care that they died in prison?’” she said. “But when you talk to these families, their loved ones expected to have a release date that people were hoping and planning for.”
She also made the point that readers should care about how effective our prisons are.
“It is a huge expense that taxpayers have, and [the incarcerated] are kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but this is your money that’s funding — millions and millions of dollars — going into the prisons.”
The story is long, about a 15-minute read, but I hope you spend some time with it.
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