How a Text From the FBI Helped Me Understand My Brother’s Mental Illness
Reading Time: 7 minutesThe FBI Seized my Brother’s Journal After His Arrest. What Was Inside Tells a Much Bigger Story., And everything wrong with how prisons handle mental health., How prisons fail people with mental illness.
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Last fall, an unfamiliar phone number with an Alaskan area code lined my phone’s recent call log in red. I hit decline, assuming it was a telemarketer, and never bothered to listen to the voicemail the caller left. That is, until the same number sent me a text message identifying themselves as an FBI agent looking for someone to accept custody of some items belonging to my brother.
I stared at the text. Part of me wanted to dismiss it as an elaborate scam, but the part of me that has always been in close proximity to my brother’s chaos knew better. I had never interacted directly with the FBI, but it wasn’t all that long ago that my brother was wanted by the U.S. Marshals.
Over the years, this chaos has made me a reluctant collector of belongings. My basement is home to several garbage bags full of my brother’s things from his last incarceration. Piles of legal paperwork, stacks of letters, cards from our grandmother, books, art sketches on repurposed envelopes or torn pieces of folders, and a pair of plain black canvas sneakers are among his only possessions. I have two plastic totes from years prior with similar contents, which I leave untouched in hopes of someday returning them to him. When someone spends much of their adulthood incarcerated, they are a forced minimalist—and their family members are left with a smattering of things to hold on to in their place.
I was curious what belongings this self-proclaimed FBI agent had to return, so I called him back. He said he couldn’t release things directly to my brother while he was still in prison and nonchalantly told me he would deliver them to my house within an hour. I gave him my address and we hung up, our conversation less than three minutes.
My husband was working in his home office, so I opened his door and stood there awkwardly with something to say but unsure of how exactly to say it. This internal struggle of shame and love has long clouded our conversations about my family. I often attempt to soften the truth in circumstances like this, wanting to preserve love for my brother despite the situations he gets himself, and subsequently us, into.
‘So … the FBI is stopping by our house in about an hour to drop some things off,’ I told him, explaining the text.
‘You gave our address to a random person over the phone?’ He was alarmed, his response lined with a protective undertone I recognized well. ‘What if it’s some sort of criminal trying to get revenge on your brother, and they just show up and murder us all?’ I knew his apprehension was fueled by the memory of the time he opened the door to an argumentative man who was searching for my brother. Our daughter was inside, just a baby at the time.
Luckily, the man who pulled up to our suburban house in a dad-type SUV was, in fact, an FBI agent. I walked outside to meet him on our MediaDownloader walkway, the uneven tiles a mirror of my insides.
‘It’s not much, just some paperwork and what looks like a journal. I have to warn you, it’s pretty dark,’ the agent said with a sympathetic sigh. He handed over a small pile of paperwork, a folder, and a composition book bundled together with a rubber band. We stood awkwardly exchanging pleasantries, an agent who had helped put my brother behind bars and me, one of the thousands of family members who cry in private when men like him do their jobs.
I took the pile into my bedroom and shut the door for privacy. I removed the rubber band, not knowing exactly what it would release from its grip.
The composition book was worn and tattered, dark in appearance and content. It held a certain embodiment of my brother’s mental illness, the exact diagnosis of which has been unclear for most of his life. For years, he was given varying explanations, like bipolar disorder or oppositional defiant disorder—but the focus on his struggles with addiction overshadowed all else. More recently, when he was stable, he told me that a psychiatrist from our county jail had diagnosed him with a type of schizophrenia. That label and this makeshift journal were two missing pieces in the puzzle of my brother.
I read the journal despite the incredible intrusion of privacy it was for me to turn its pages. I have been witness to small pieces of my brother’s mental illness for all of my life—though until that day, they had been like distant sightings of a Sasquatch. I had seen the grainy shape of its outline, found a footprint or two, known that it carried an air of danger, but I had never had the photographic evidence.
Today, my brother is serving another sentence in a windowless cell inside of a federal prison more than 700 miles from where I live. He is the person I giggled with as a child in the backseat of our parents’ four-door Buick, the father of two thriving children he barely knows, and an artist whose innate talents mirror our mother’s. He is also among the 37 percent of adults who are living within state and federal prison systems who have a history of mental illness. The journal full of dark, incoherent ramblings was a physical reminder of how those systems fail to provide meaningful or consistent mental health care. At the time of his previous release, he was among the 63 percent of people with a history of mental illness who did not receive treatment while incarcerated. Unmedicated and untreated, it was not long before he was swept back into the system.
When my brother was arrested toward the end of 2019, my family asked me to write a letter for the judge to consider before sentencing. I searched for words that could explain what I knew: He was ill and needed help. The words felt inadequate, the letter futile.
After my brother’s arrest, the FBI seized the journal—which is now discreetly tucked away inside a decorative box on a shelf in my home office—as possible evidence in his case. I look at it now and see only evidence of a broken system. A system that could have taken one look inside this paperback journal and understood more than my letter could ever convey. A system that released him from one prison with no acknowledgment of any mental health issues just to then be surprised when he committed the same offense and found himself back in the same tired loop of courthouses and jail cells.
I remember that release well, the sunny days lengthening as we approached the summer of 2019. I was bustling with preparations for his move to a reentry center in my city, a transition point after years spent behind bars for a bank robbery to support his lifelong addiction. I had been buoyed with hope. I relished in visions of family dinners where my brother would not be a stranger to my children, a time when family wounds would be slowly replaced with pride.
The first time I saw him during that transition period, my hope drained quickly. He looked over his shoulder in paranoia and made statements about being followed and people watching us. He did not resemble a reformed man preparing to reenter our society, but rather a sick man, wayward in the confines of government institutions. The reentry center was focused on him finding employment within 30 days of his release rather than helping him connect with the psychiatrist and therapist he desperately needed.
When he absconded from the reentry center and was labeled a fugitive, he did what he had done before: robbed a few banks for drug money. Customers tackled and held him for police, perfect fodder for news outlets. I was likely the only reader who wasn’t celebrating his swift prosecution.
Months after that arrest, I went to visit him at my local jail prior to his sentencing, after which he could be sent anywhere in the country. When he walked through the doors to the visitation area, I could see from his walk, from the way he carried his body, from the moment he opened his mouth … I could see something had changed.
‘What’s different? You are different …’ I croaked out. I was unable to contain the tears that held a lifetime of sorrow for my sibling, my shared DNA.
With a smirk I still recognize from childhood, he answered sheepishly, ‘Oh, they put me on meds. It’s some kind of antipsychotic. I actually feel like myself.’
I left that day with a despondency I share silently with countless other families around the country. Families that see our loved ones’ identities reduced to an eight-digit number in a system that counts them but does not care for them. That blames them but does not accept any accountability. I had been gifted a magical glimpse of what adequate mental health treatment could do for my brother, but I knew that care was unlikely to follow him from jail to prison—and I now know for certain that it did not. Each institution has its own policies and resource deficits, and the outside world chooses to not look too closely.
If you do look closely, as I have for the past 15 years as a sister, the lack of continuity and communication between individual jails and prisons is causing direct harm to incarcerated people, their families, and our communities. It is commonly said that jails and prisons are the largest mental health facilities in the United States, and it’s a fundamental problem that these environments are designed to punish rather than treat.
When I was writing the letter to the judge on my brother’s behalf, I wish I could have asked him to read the journal the FBI handed over to me. To hold the weight of it, to see the darkness, to feel the pain. I would have asked him where we went so wrong.
I know it’s a hard question, because the answer is an indictment that calls for change. To change, we must see things that are easier to look away from. I keep my brother’s journal tucked away in a box because the sight of it reminds me of his reality. The problem is, not looking does not make it disappear.
We must start by removing the lids from where we hide things and by being willing to look with compassion at what’s inside.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/mental-illness-incarceration.html
Ref: slate
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