A very angry mother has to bury her son Bradley Ballard (39), who was mentally ill because he made a pass at a female Correction Officer at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility in N.Y. After making an unflattering gesture to the C.O. the inmate was placed in his cell for 7 days without medication his medication.
The inmate was checked on periodically, but not taken seriously until it was too late. Ballard was found unresponsive on the floor, in his cell where he clogged his toilet, and wrapped a rubber band tightly around his genitals.
“He didn’t have to leave this world like that. They could have put him in a mental hospital, got him some treatment,” Ballard’s mother, Beverly Ann Griffin, said from her Houston, Texas, home. “He was a caring young man.”
Maybe the Corrections Department is the one that needs the correcting. What will happen to the rest of the mentally ill, who happen to make up about 40 percent of the 12,000 inmates in Rikers today?
via CBS
