I can't forget the night I spent on the phone with Ralph Tortorici's father.
Ralph had been telling him horrible things about prison life, Bob Tortorici said. They were doing terrible things to him. He didn't belong there. He belonged in a hospital."Yeah,' I said, "I agree with you. But there's one problem."
"I know," Bob Tortorici said. "You don't know if what he's saying is real."
I talked to the prison authorities anyway. Look, they told me, Ralph was found guilty, and the court sentenced him. We're putting him into more tightly supervised settings when it seems necessary, but what are we supposed to do here? We run prisons. We don't run mental hospitals.
They were right. Ralph's father was right, too. But maybe Ralph also was right. He thought he was. He was so certain of it, in fact, that he decided to end what he believed he was suffering. On Tuesday, he hanged himself in prison. This suicide is only the most recent example of how wretchedly this society -- that's you and me and the cold-hearted, penny-pinching politicians we elect -- treat people with mental illness. This is our great shame as a people.
In many ways, we're a better people than we once were, but we still have a lot to be ashamed of. If we're no longer outwardly cruel to people of different races, we are, at best, careless to them. We remain cruel, many of us, to people whose love lives differ from our own. We've thrown up our hands in despair at helping the poor. Too many of our children run wild and without guidance.
But nowhere is our shame darker than in our treatment of those left helpless by diseases of the mind. To save tax dollars, we throw them out of public hospitals all across the country to sleep in the street and freeze in the winter. And sometimes, as in the case of Ralph Tortorici, to hurt other people as they cry out in their agony.
Tortorici was a paranoid schizophrenic. He believed with every fiber of his being that the CIA had implanted a computer chip in his body. He came into contact many, many times with the laughable system we have in place to deal with people like him. He got no real help. He was left alone with his imaginary terrors.
So, one day, he took a rifle to a lecture hall at the State University of New York at Albany. He held a class hostage to draw attention to his plight. He shot a young man, Jason McEnaney, leaving him unable to father children. Then we put Tortorici in the slammer.
Not in the hospital where he should have been from the start, before his illness led him to violence. Not in a secure treatment facility where he could live out his tortured life with caring support.
No, we put him into one of the 70 prisons that New York state reserves for its worst, most violent, most dangerous criminals. We put him into a place where, according to the best estimates of this problem, as many as one in five inmates may be as severely deluded as Tortorici was.
I have a friend who sat on the jury that sent Tortorici to that prison. The charge from the judge, my friend told me -- that detailed recitation of the law that we fine, compassionate citizens have in place in New York, and that most other states have in place as well -- left the jury no choice.
So, now, Ralph Tortorici is dead by his own hand. The kid he maimed with his bullet will live out an incomplete life, and his line will die with him. And, all of us, we're left with this simple, nagging question:
Just what kind of people are we, really, that we would let this go on and on?