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The extreme isolation and sensory deprivation found in Indiana’s Secured Housing Unit spurred four suicides and numerous self-mutilations by mentally ill prisoners, said the American Civil Liberties Union today in a lawsuit filed against state prison officials. "Locking up prisoners with mental illness in small windowless cells is psychological torture," said Ken Falk, Legal Director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. "Confinement for lengthy periods of time in 24-hour isolation would compromise even a healthy person’s sanity." At issue in today’s complaint, filed by the ACLU’s National Prison Project and Indiana Civil Liberties Union, are the brutal conditions faced by mentally ill prisoners confined in the Secured Housing Unit (SHU) at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, Indiana, a "supermax" facility. The ACLU charges that the prisoners’ mental illness is exacerbated by the unbearable conditions in the SHU, which have caused prisoners to hallucinate, rip chunks of flesh from their bodies, rub feces on themselves and attempt suicide. "A disproportionately high number of mentally ill prisoners are transferred to the SHU because they are often misidentified as trouble-makers in prison," said David C. Fathi, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. "If mentally ill prisoners receive inadequate mental health care or their disease worsens because of the extreme deprivation within the SHU, it is likely they will find it difficult to obey prison rules and will remain stuck at the facility indefinitely." [more]