Unraveling California's Mental Health Nightmare

Part I: Welcome to the Machine

Prisons are trauma factories.

Much like recycling plants, prisons take things that have been discarded and further break them down. Rather than reducing individuals to their base elements in order to rebuild them into something new, however, the primary purpose of prisons is to indefinitely warehouse these demanufactured souls, or to toss them back out onto the streets of local communities like pop bottles chucked from car windows.

It is difficult to imagine any place where delivering effective mental health care could have a greater impact than inside our prisons, where the negative outcomes of neglecting to nourish the human spirit in every possible way are already obvious. Everyone in prison who has caused harm generally first found themselves on the receiving end of victimization, and our system makes no bones about inflicting more trauma upon them every step of the way from the cop car to the prison cell.

With such overwhelming need for healing centralized in the grim places we incarcerate folks, it stands to reason that each and every prison ought to be a hub of treatment and compassion so as to further the mission of rehabilitation. After all, since virtually everyone in prison will one day be released, it only makes sense that when they walk free they should have been made as whole as possible by their time inside so they can move forward, abandon old behaviors, and be a positive part of the society they are once more a member of.

Yet if one wishes to bear witness to a system meant to handle crisis that is itself in catastrophic crisis, let us take a peek behind the razor wire and bars. Let us examine what breed of 'treatment' we are currently delivering- and financing- to those who most likely will eventually become someone's neighbors. Maybe yours.

Let us look inside the mental health system of American prisons.

Prisons are about the last place on Earth anyone wants to end up. They are, on the whole, violent, flooded with drugs, infested with gangs, and rife with corruption. The root cause of most of these issues- which endanger the safety and wellbeing of prisoners and staff alike- is a lack of effective mental health care.

The average American prison is capable of providing, on a good day, only the most basic 'treatment': they can dope you up with psychotropic drugs and leave you to your own devices or they can lock you in solitary confinement without your shoelaces if you threaten to harm yourself. Apart from that, mental health care in prison is a hodgepodge of programs, if there are any, that are all underfunded, chronically short staffed, and decades behind their time. Occasionally somebody, somewhere gets some help, but since positive treatment outcomes are in no way incentivized this is the exception rather than the rule.

One prime example of how a prison system's mental health care service can become a bottomless well of dysfunction is California, though in all fairness its myriad failures are in no way unique across the good old U. S. of A.

In 1990 a class action lawsuit arose from the deplorable conditions of mental health care within the state prisons. Yet, in 2024, a whopping thirty four years later, California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation currently stands in contempt of court and is being fined millions of dollars a month for being so grossly out of compliance with the court's orders in the very same case.

In fact, the situation has become so dire in the Golden State that in a drastic Hail Mary attempt to stem the carnage the court has taken control of the CDCR's mental health delivery system away from them entirely and entrusted it to a federal receiver because of, among other things, its ongoing 'unacceptably high' rate of suicides.

And that is just the tip of the Titanic-sinker.

So, why is mental health care in prisons so bad? It can't simply be because nobody really cares what happens to people in prisons, and that the veil of obscurity behind the walls ensures few even ever have a clue what goes on inside... Can it?

As someone who has personally survived the meatgrinder of California's prison system and has also experienced its mental health care at every level of 'treatment,' I wanted answers - not just for myself but for all of the countless thousands of others who have been in a bad place, needed help, and not received it, as well as for the neighbors we will one day have, and the hapless taxpayers who should know exactly what their hard earned money buys them.

So, let's get started.

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Part II: Trudging Through Molasses

To understand why the system is failing, first we have to ask: what IS the California prison mental health system?

Within California's prison warren there exists four distinct levels of mental health care: the Correctional Clinical Care Management System, Enhanced Outpatient, Mental Health Crisis Bed placement, and 'inpatient', or what we used to call being sent to DMH, the Department of Mental Health, aka the psych ward. Decades of evidence suggests that far more effort has gone into coming up with high dollar names for these programs than ensuring they actually accomplish anything meaningful.

The Correctional Clinical Case Management System (CCCMS, or 'Triple C') is not a program at all. Triple C is a designation given to any California prisoner who is prescribed psychotropic medication. It also includes some people who have serious mental health concerns but refuse to cave to the tremendous pressure the psychiatrists put on everybody to take such medications as a primary means of dealing with whatever issues bring them to mental health in the first place.

Triple C does include counseling, but at a single thirty minute session with a 'clinician' every 60 to 90 days (or longer, when there is a staffing shortage, which is roughly always), the counseling offered hardly does more than tease a person in need of help.

Enhanced Outpatient (EOP) by contrast is an actual program. In EOP everyone is on medication and the inmates are required to attend about a dozen hour-long groups per week. Again great care has been effected in slapping important-sounding names onto things with little substance. Stress Management, Anger Management, Substance Abuse Management, Coping with Depression, and so on are all groups that consist primarily of viewing videos vaguely related to the subject at hand while sitting in a semicircle under the sleepy watch of a nursing assistant who doesn't want to be there any more than most of the participants, who face all manner of punishments and restrictions if their attendance dips below a certain level.

While the aforementioned groups may offer some benefit despite their inefficient presentation, the bulk of the EOP program's 'treatment' hours are fulfilled with 'recreation therapy.' Rec therapy groups, of which everyone in the program has many, consists of simply going to the yard- something one could do anyways, were they so inclined - and walking around the track or playing Bocce ball. When the temperature is over 90°F or if it is raining, the group is instead moved inside and transforms into 'art therapy,' which means coloring.

Triple C and EOP make up the bulk of the mental health treatment administered by the California prison system, and over 90% of those who receive any mental health care at all receive it exclusively at these levels. There do exist, however, two more intensive levels of care.

Those deemed too dangerous or unstable for the EOP program to manage are often sent to a Mental Health Crisis Bed (MHCB). Usually someone lands in a crisis bed after a serious suicide attempt or a psychotic break. While MHCBs were intended to 'stabilize' those in acute crises, they are nothing more than observation units - solitary confinement, but in a cell where it's easy to swing by every fifteen minutes to check and see if you're still alive. No meaningful treatment is rendered in a crisis bed apart from medication, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that most folks who warrant placement here are return customers.

In theory once a person in crisis is stabilized they are supposed to move on to inpatient treatment in the Department of State Hospitals, where they can work with clinicians to address the roots of the issues which brought them into crisis to begin with. In practice, alas, there is no room for anything remotely resembling the number of people who need such robust care, so most people who land in a crisis bed end up shipped back to the prisons they came from, possibly no longer in crisis but with zero progress made to resolving their underlying issues.

To win the lottery and be admitted to 'inpatient care' at the psych ward one must be in truly dire straits. Those with persistent psychosis or suicidality - or both - populate the scarce beds at the pinnacle of the CDCR's care pyramid. Even here treatment options are depressingly limited. Inpatient care is a combination of MHCB and EOP, meaning that patients are locked down in observation units by themselves for most of the day and heavily medicated (by court order and by force, if need be), but they are also let out for a few hours a day for marginally effective group therapy or to talk to a psychologist.

Placement in the psych ward generally lasts a month, but can be extended if the patient is lucky enough to get a spot in the three or six month programs. During my stay, there were roughly thirty such spots for a prison population of about 170,000, so don't hold your breath (or they might give you a shot.) Regardless of the duration of the vacation, once it's over the patient is chained up, loaded into a van, and driven back to prison to be dumped back into the general population to begin the cycle anew.

Despite having spent decades and billions of dollars on 'bolstering' it, the CDCR's mental health delivery system is an abject failure. Despite the ongoing class action lawsuits and millions upon millions racked up in fines, despite three decades of outside overseers breathing down their necks and twisting the thumbscrews to force the prison to comply with the court's orders, despite the legions of experts - many of whom formerly worked for the CDCR at its highest levels - decrying its failures and telling them precisely what must be done in order to provide its prisoners with 'constitutionally adequate mental health care,' the California prison system is so mired in dysfunction that it cannot, it will not, and just this year the three judge panel ordered its mental health care delivery system under full federal receivership for noncompliance and an 'unacceptably high' rate of suicides within its facilities.

And still there ain't nothing changed but the weather.

In short, after thirty plus years of 'we're working on it, hang tight,' the federal judges in charge of arbitrating the settlement negotiated after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was judged to have failed to stop violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by its indecent standard of care have said enough is enough.

The most basic, fundamental purpose of mental health treatment in prisons is to prevent prisoners from committing suicide, yet over the decades of broken promises and neglect the rate of prisoner suicide in California state prisons still remains far above the national average and in some years even set records.

So, with all these fancy levels of care and all this federal oversight, the question remains: Why are so many California prisoners still killing themselves?

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Part III: Second Verse, Same As The First

"For years the medical and mental health care provider in California's prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners' basic health needs. Needless suffering and death have been the well documented result."

- United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Brown v Plata, May 23, 2011

In 2024, the situation inside California's prisons is anything but novel.

"For most of the past two decades, California's annual inmate suicide rate has equalled or exceeded the national average . . . Total inmate suicides in California have ranged from a low of 15 in 2000 and 2021 to a high of 43 in 2005 and 2006; the total reached 38 as recently as 2019."

- Chief United States District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, Coleman v. Newsom, January 6, 2023

Before I started writing this article I spent a month doing research. During that month, for at least the second time this year, an inmate at my facility hung himself.

Why prisoners choose to end their own lives is a complex question. All one can really do is go case by case and look for the trends that present themselves.

For me, the root of it was hopelessness.

I had just entered one of the prison's reception centers after being sentenced to a 100 year no parole period. All I saw around me was hatred, violence, and pain. I had no interests. I had no loved ones. I had no future. I had no hope.

Fifteen years later I sit here tracing the scars that took over 70 surgical staples to close and all I can say is, I survived. My odyssey through the California prison mental health system was so distinctly unpleasant that I lost the motivation to try to do myself in again. But I'd hardly call that a cure.

So, hopelessness is as good a common thread as any to explain the existential crises facing those who decide there is but one path left to take behind bars. Suicide is never the solution to anything - as often said, 'a permanent solution to a temporary problem' - but I understand how someone can find themselves standing on that precipice.

I understand why some people jump.

Prisons hide behind their walls and concertina wire everything awful you can imagine. Inside you will find drugs and gangs, abuse and tyranny, extortion and exploitation and rape and murder. You may be a victim, or a witness, or you may simply live day in, day out with the knowledge that the environment you exist in permits all these things if not outright embraces them.

In prison one of the first lessons is how it feels to truly be at someone else's mercy.

It can be no shock, then, that within prisons are great numbers of people who have been traumatized. Few if any prisoners I have met, especially among those who commit violence or take someone's life, were not first victimized. Inside of prisons the predator and prey cycle continues, often facilitated or perpetrated by the same staff tasked with preventing it. More often than not there is no recourse and no accountability.

"I think it's unbelievable that in this state we have the kind of overcrowded conditions that we have; that we do little or nothing to prepare people for the return to society in spite of the fact that we parole 10,000 people a month from our prison system.

And I absolutely believe that we make people worse, and that we are not meeting public safety by the way we treat people."

- Jeanne Woodford, former Warden of San Quentin State Prison and Acting Secretary of the California Department of Corrections

Placing anyone into such a toxic environment as exists within California's correctional facilities would test them to their limit. But those who enter our prisons are not our best and brightest, not our most well adjusted and mentally sound.

Those who live under the faded 'No Warning Shots' signs are drawn deeply from our most vulnerable communities: our prisoners are our addicts and our mentally ill, our homeless and our poor, our abused kids and battered spouses. Our prisoners are the legacies of our other failing systems at the denouement of their downward spirals. Our prisons brim with our society's unmentionables.

We are not helping them. We are not healing them. Our prisons walk a fine line between neglecting their charges outright and making them worse.

"Placing inmates in overcrowded gym and dorm settings is often inappropriate for people with mental health issues and can either exacerbate existing symptoms or, in some cases, trigger symptoms in people who would not otherwise display them."

- Dr. Stewart, mental health expert for the plaintiffs, Coleman v. Schwarzenegger

"Crowding has also created severe bed shortages at every level of the CDCR's mental health care system, causing inmates in need of higher levels of care to languish in clinically inappropriate settings . . . at the level of care reserved for the most mentally ill, inmates sometimes wait as much as a year before being transferred to inpatient beds."

"These shortages at every level, which are caused by the lack of space resulting from overcrowding, have created a destructive feedback loop that is now endemic to the CDCR's mental health care delivery system - inmates denied necessary mental health placements are decompensating and are ending up in mental health conditions far more acute than necessary . . . creating a cycle of sicker people being admitted with greater resources necessary to treat them, which creates further backlogs in an already overwhelmed system."

- United States Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, August 4, 2009

Not all prison systems face such an intractable mess. What makes California's prisons so especially dysfunctional?

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Part IV: Life In The Sardine Can

"Short term gains in the provision of care have been eroded by the long term effects of severe overcrowding. . . . Overcrowding is the primary cause of the violation of a federal right, specifically the severe and unlawful mistreatment of prisoners through grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care."

- United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Brown v. Plata, May 23, 2011

As I enter my 17th year in the California prison system I am trying to remember a single moment when we were not jammed in here like human Tetris pieces, but no such time exists in my mind.

I consulted the collective living memory of the inmates around me, and even the real old timers - those guys who have been in here since before I was born - find it hard to recall when the prisons were any less crowded.

"It's ALWAYS been like this. I remember, they had bunks stacked so high your face is six inches from the ceiling." (L., 37 years down)

"Hell, I remember it being crowdedER. They came into the gym and put down a brand new hardwood floor, and a year later it was FULL of bunks." (R., 43 years down)

"Has it always been like this? Gosh no! The whole prison system was single cell back when I came in. They didn't come put a second bunk in the cells until the 80's..." (B., 49 years down)

Overcrowding in the prisons is the predictable result of locking up too many people for too long. It is a problem which exacerbates itself: the more crowded the prisons, the worse the conditions are inside and the less chance there is of the people within them being rehabilitated. That in turn leads to people paroling who are more likely to commit new crimes and come right back to the pressure cooker. Instead of working to reduce the population through novel ideas - like actually helping people - the CDCR simply crams new arrivals in anywhere they can.

"One consequence of the growing gap between the size of the CDCR population and the capacity of its prisons has been a significant increase in the use of 'nontraditional' or so-called 'ugly' or 'bad' beds. These include triple bunks, housing two inmates in cells designed for one inmate, and beds. . . crammed into gyms and dayrooms that were never meant to be used for housing."

- United States Circuit Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, August 4, 2009

"Truly appalling. In more than 35 years of prison work experience, I have never seen anything like it."

- Dr. Doyle Wayne Scott, former Executive Director of Corrections in Texas, about some of the ugly beds he saw on his tours of California prisons.

Filling the prisons up to bursting and then piling even more people into them creates a scenario not unlike locusts descending upon a field: resources are consumed in a great orgy with zero thought given for what happens when they abruptly run out.

If a yard has a design capacity of 600 and there are two doctors, two psychologists, and one psychiatrist to staff it, those professionals are already overburdened. But once that yard is housing 1200 people and no provisions have been made to hire any more medical or mental health staff, what happens?

"Ten years ago I went to see about talking to a clinician about my problems and how I can work through them. They asked me, 'are you depressed? Are you schizophrenic?' I said, 'no, I just want to talk to someone.' They said, 'we don't have time for that. Do you want meds?'

I said no and they said there's too many people for them to deal with me, and they gave me some papers about depression. I said, 'I don't want to read some stupid shit, I want someone to talk to about life and stuff.' And she told me 'thanks for coming in, if your mental problems get worse and you become schizo or manic, put in a medical slip.'”

And it is not only a shortage of doctors and mental health professionals.

"The number of custodial staff is often grossly inadequate to meet basic needs, with often only 2 officers to supervise 200 prisoners in a gym or dorm. This is extremely dangerous for both the prisoners and the staff because line of sight supervision is impossible under these circumstances and it does not permit the staff to recognize that prisoners are in trouble from any number of causes, including medical or mental illness."

- Jeanne Woodford, former Warden and Acting Secretary of the CDCR

"The risk of catastrophic failure in a system strained from severe overcrowding is a constant threat."

- John Dovey, Director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the CDCR, August 2006

The obvious solution would be to hire more people to work in our prisons' mental health and medical sectors to ease the burden on the existing clinical staff. Yet, again, the beast of overcrowding rears its head:

"The clinical space allotted at San Quentin is so substandard and creates such a stressful environment that. . . the prison's capacity to retain physicians is seriously jeopardized by both the physicians' perception of personal safety issues and the unprofessional conditions. Many newly hired clinicians will be unwilling to risk their professional credentials and reputations by practicing in an environment where their patients are at risk of harm because, among other things, adequate clinical space is scarce, appointments are not scheduled, complete medical records are unavailable, and medications are not delivered."

- Dr. Ronald Shansky, Medical Director for the Illinois Department of Corrections

Again and again we return to the same question: how do we fix it? The evidence suggests there is no answer. Along this tortuous journey since 1990 seemingly every expert in the world has weighed in, every court with a lick of jurisdiction has issued its orders, billions of dollars have been frittered away year after year.

Yet here I sit in 2024, writing this from an ugly bed. I've never been on anything else, and one of my greatest fears is that one day I will have a medical emergency in prison. Because I know I will probably die, because I have seen it happen more times than I can count.

During my time inside things have changed, but these changes have been glacial and for the most part minimally effective in altering how medical and mental health care services are provided behind prison walls. To be sure they have cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum, never doubt it, but the will to create true transformation petered out years ago and those of us who are forced to depend on the system languish, watching robots go through motions.

It struck me as strange, though hardly surprising, that in the over thirty years the courts and the state government and the prison administration and the lawyers have been fighting each other on what to do about this issue, nobody has bothered to ask those stuck in the middle what they think could be done to help make things better and prevent suicides.

So, I did.

I conducted a mental health survey of my fellow prisoners at my facility (and at others, through the mail.) In the survey, one of the questions I asked was, what do you think could be improved about California's prison mental health system - if you were in charge, what would YOU change?

"More meetings with the therapist and consistency of having the same therapist."

"My doctor never wants to hear me out."

"Have CCCMS patients check in with staff a minimum of once every 30 days instead of once every 90 days."

"They need more staff."

"When I speak with my clinician he helps me. . . but their caseloads are so big they can hardly see us. Too much time goes by between visits."

"I've had probably 12 to 15 different [clinicians], with 8 to 10 somewhere between useless and traumatizing. . . the docs who truly want to help invariably leave quickly."

Everybody just wants someone to talk to. Someone to listen to them. Someone to care.

"The situation in California is so egregious. . . the prisons aren't safe. Nobody seems to be willing to step up to the plate and fix the problem."

- Joseph Lehman, former Head of Corrections in Pennsylvania, Washington, and Maine

Sorry. We don't do that in the Golden State.

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Part V: What We Focus On Grows

After I finished writing the above, yesterday, I abruptly decided that was a solid ending and declared this piece done instead of writing a conclusion. It seemed appropriate, given the overwhelming evidence about how bad things have been and still are within the prisons and the odds against anything really happening to break that stalemate this late in the game, to just give up: we're screwed. Game over.

Then I saw a guy going to dinner in his sweatpants and I started to think.

Writing this article has been an emotional journey for me, not only in revisiting my own experiences in the system but in reading the myriad court cases detailing all the things I and everyone else around me have been through, and the people who came before us have been through, and the people who aren't alive anymore have been through. Some of them no doubt would be, if things had changed when they were supposed to.

And I was thinking about that guy who killed himself here last month, some random dude whose name I don't even know, and thinking about the many others who have done the same during my time, or tried to, and the people who responded to my survey. We are all linked together despite the artificially divisive nature of the system we are enmeshed in. We are a community of outsiders.

Before I wrote this section I wanted to end the article with a middle finger for the system that failed that random guy, and every random guy, and every random girl, and everyone else, and me, because I'm angry. I am angry and I am hurt, far more so than I was when I came into prison if somehow that is even possible.

The difference between then and now is that I've learned how to channel that anger and pain into positive, healing, creative pursuits. I have learned how to process my emotions into building blocks for my future, rather than making pipe bombs from them to destroy any chance at it.

And that's the entire point of mental health care in prison: to guide broken people towards wholeness so they don't hurt anymore and can stop hurting others. To help them back up when they fall down so they don't give up. To tell them they're doing a good job and they aren't worthless when they make the effort, to encourage them to keep making the effort no matter how long the road is or how many obstacles they run into. Understanding, support, motivation, recognition.

Hope.

So I chose not to be the hope killer. I chose not to just say we're all fucked. Because as much as it can feel that way, that is not true.

The California prison system will in all likelihood never deliver 'constitutionally adequate mental health care' (and oh boy, how exciting! The barest minimum allowed by law - I'm dancing in the streets already.) The courts will in all likelihood never be able to enforce their orders in any meaningful way and effect changes within the prisons. And the CDCR will certainly never up and decide to do the right thing on its own.

But we never really expected any of those things to happen anyways. And there is power in accepting that they will not come to pass. In letting go of false hope, we make room for something real.

Another common thread from the survey responses: when asked about the overall effectiveness of the California mental health system, people often said you get out of it what you put into it, and made references to the ways in which they did the work themselves rather than waiting for the system to find a place to squeeze them in.

If there is one thing I can take away after all my research, all the interviews, and my own lived experience inside this great grinding machine it's this: it is up to us to care for ourselves. The system is not a reliable partner in the healing journey, and we cannot rely upon it for help in such vital work.

But we are not alone.

Prisons are overcrowded. This creates an endless list of unconstitutional, frustrating, and dangerous conditions under which we all live every minute of every day of our time inside. The upside, however, is that this also means there are other people around us all the time. Even as we battle our demons and search for meaning in our own lives, those elbow to elbow with us are doing the same. Our pain and fear and uncertainty may feel unfathomable to those outside ourselves, but others face the same challenges we do. Underneath it all, we just don't want to hurt or be afraid.

Healing is perhaps the most difficult work any of us will ever undertake, yet it is also the most rewarding. The transformation that comes in our thoughts and feelings and actions is better than any drug or old bad habit. Creating self worth in our hearts after years or decades or an eternity of emptiness is literally a life altering experience.

I didn't believe it. But I tried anyways. And dammit, now I do.

We are all one community inside. While we have our differences - politics, religions, life experiences, personal beefs - we do not exist in isolation. If we can't count on the system or some power outside it to intervene on our behalf and save us, then it becomes our responsibility to save ourselves - and to save each other.

We know best what challenges we face. That means we are the best positioned to receive as well as give help, hope, and care to our brothers and sisters under the gun alongside us. When we are new inside we find our way best by listening to the O.G.s who came before us and lived through what we now must and survived and learned. As we progress along our journey we gain our own wisdom and build on the knowledge passed down to us from our elders. We too survive, and learn.

"You are the way and the wayfarers.

And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.

Aye, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone."

- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet: On Crime and Punishment

Whether each step is a feather touch or a brutal slog, we are making it through. The burden is easier to bear when we share the weight, when we open ourselves to the unlimited possibilities that exist even in this overcrowded, restrictive, 'No Warning Shots' space.

Keep going, even when you think you can't. Especially when you think you can't. When we walk with our head held high enough to see that we are not alone, we walk in wisdom.

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Postscript

By Ronin Grey

19 December 2024

After I finished 'Unraveling California's Mental Health Nightmare' I wondered about the age of some of the quotes I used in it. Because the court cases have dragged on since the 1990's I thought it might be a bit unfair, that using old quotes could show the system as it was years ago and ignore the progress it may have made since then in becoming better.

I decided to let the quotes stand, if for no better reason than my own lived experience and my research indicates that whatever changes may have occurred, the underlying situation remains essentially the same. Less than half an hour after I sent out the last edits and declared it a finished piece, I happened to overhear someone on the yard saying that the long alarm we had this morning was yet another inmate at this facility hanging themselves.

I feel the article remains timely because the situation is still urgent inside. This is one of over thirty prisons in California and we have now had at least three suicides this year on this yard alone. Despite how much of a bummer the news was, I was glad to hear the guy spreading not gossip but a message of hope.

He waved me over and told us that we are all in this together, and we had to look out for each other, and that when we're going through it, it's OK to talk to somebody, and that we are all brothers.

I thanked him, and this impromptu pep talk, more than anything, reassured me that what I had started uncovering with my article runs deep within many more hearts than just my own. It's not that the system is failing us; we all know that. It's that we are the ones who must, and can, and will, save each other.

–ronin