Why is Karl Taylor Dead?

(The Marshall Project) Our prisons are our mental wards. One fatal case in New York shows where that can lead. On the morning of April 13 2015 a guard at Sullivan Correctional Facility a New York State maximum-security prison nestled deep in the woods of the western Catskills ordered a prisoner named Karl Taylor to clean his cell. By all accounts the cell in the prisons E North housing blocka special unit for inmates classified as mentally illwas a rancid mess strewn with papers and clothes and soaked with shampoo and other liquids. Taylor however had balked for weeks at cleaning it. He insisted that as part of an ongoing campaign of harassment guards had trashed his cell and stolen his belongings while he was being held in a mental-health observation unit in a separate wing of the 550-inmate prison. Read More