They're there if they are a risk to themselves or others.
Prisoners have committed a crime. They are detained as punishment.
These are two totally different reasons for the removal of liberty. But
what of the experience?
I've only been in a jail cell less than a handful of times and never
more than an overnight stay but I've been sectioned twice in two
different hospitals (one in Nottingham and one in London).
Detention of liberty is punishment. Lack of freedom to live life is the
greatest punishment before physical torture. The conditions are poor.
There is no option for consumption nor much social contact with
established social networks which is how most people get their
happiness. There may be limited opportunities to have fun. Some people
may spend long periods incarcerated or even their whole lives.
I wrote that last paragraph to be a description of what I imagine prison
life to be like. As I re-read it it sounds like psychiatric ward life.
Prison of course must be unimagineably worse but it is meant to be
punishment (which I disagree with but that's a whole other thing). A
psychiatric ward is healthcare.
The basic right of consumption - to chose what you eat and buy - is
often not afforded to patients under section. The lucky ones can
negotiate section 17 leave so they can walk down to the local shops.
Many others can't and in practice getting section 17 leave can be hard.
Consumption is a basic right taken away from prisoners but also from
psychiatric patients as is access to the funds to buy things. They don't
have the right to sunlight or fresh air or to walk in green space. Their
rights of privacy are minimal. They don't have the right to chose
medication. The experience of hospitalisation is often traumatic and
torturous. In practice treatment by nursing staff can be inhumane and
what I'd expected of prison guards, especially since they can use
'treatments' like acute tranquilisation that wouldn't be considered
humane for use on prisoners.
It fascinates me that there's a debate about animal rights (and a
salient one) but there still isn't the debate about the human rights of
those considered of unsound mind and put under section. The power of the
animal rights lobby may be such that in ten years we'll see chimpanzees
with more rights than patients in NHS wards.
There are many obvious problems with psychiatric wards as healthcare
facilities and many organisations and individuals have pointed this out
more clearly than I but there is this fundamental issue of rights. The
human rights of patients and prisoners are the same but there should be
legislation to ensure that hospitalisation doesn't violate human rights
in the same way a prison sentence does. Without this law patients are
treated as badly as prisoners, confined like prisoners and have the same
exclusions on their normal lives as prisoners but have committed no crime.
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