Awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, Amnesty International is a world-wide movement of people acting on the conviction that governments must not deny individuals basic human rights. Among its goals is an end to the death penalty and torture.

What should shock the reader is that in 2000, Amnesty International asserted that the special housing units (SHUs) in New York State's prisons met the definition of “torture” under international law. (Their objection was based on the hundreds of units occupied by mentally ill inmates who are in these highly restrictive disciplinary lock down units for 23 to 24 hours per day ... sometimes locked up from 6 months to 5 years at a time.)

Certainly Senator Michael Nozzolio, as chairman of the Crime and Corrections Committee, is aware of this. With only one mental health facility in New York state at Marcy - outside of Utica - which is limited because there are only 190 beds, one should wonder why the senator has done nothing to expand treatment facilities for the mentally ill prisoner?

In a Department of Corrections' newsletter (8/02), it was acknowledged that “10 percent of the state's 62,000 inmate population has been diagnosed with a mental illness - half of them serious.”

A recent study by the Correctional Association of New York which monitors prison conditions found that mentally ill inmates who failed to understand basic commands were often undermining prison security by getting in fights. (This may be one valid reason why Senator Nozzolio would have had to hire more guards.) We often hear about feces being thrown at the guards and the report cited this as one of several ways the mentally ill lash out!

The public understands that proper care and treatment should be given the mentally ill and so, please let Senator Nozzolio know he needs to get behind Senate Bill 1634 which the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services is advocating be passed.

Joyce Hackett Smith-Moore

Moravia