“They were destroying me,” said one person placed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “Program for the Aggressive Mentally Ill Offender.”
According to reporting by The Appeal, a voluntary TDCJ program called the “Program for the Aggressive Mentally Ill Offender” or PAMIO is part of the TDCJ’s broader system of managed care. Through this program, the prison agency partners with Texas universities to provide detainees with health care.The PAMIO program, which a TDCJ spokesperson said currently has 33 medical staff and a capacity to treat 246 people, is just one of many of the programs across the country that gets tax dollars to assist those with mental illness yet, according to those enrolled, it exacerbates their conditions. Across the country, these programs often resemble unregulated limbos, shielded from oversight, where incarcerated people with mental illness suffer continued abuse.
