Bill West, Psychology

Bill West

Psychology

Bill started his career as an officer with the LAPD. Then he got a Master's in Social Work, and worked in the clinic at Compton prison – with "a very disenfranchised population,” he recalls. From there he became a senior patient's advocate for the LA County Department of Patient's Rights, protecting the constitutional rights of the mentally ill when they were arrested for crimes.

Today he is a senior administrator of the L.A. Department of Mental Health, and in charge of over 500 inmates in their prison system. His research as a psychology student at Saybrook, he says, is helping to reduce violence while making make their conditions more humane.

"These inmates had been very, very violent, and there was a lot of gang activity,” he said. "After I (started at Saybrook) I went to the captain, and asked him 'why don't we do something outside of traditional therapy?' And he was very opposed to it: but eventually I was able to bring in people to lead spiritual practice groups with prisoners, and I tell you, in maybe 5 to 6 weeks the amount of violence was unbelievably low compared to what we'd had before. I could see the difference in the hard inmates. The Bloods were on one side, the Crips were on the other side, very high powered gangs here, and the members were very young men, 19 to 25, and when they had this experience they went back to their gangs and said 'there's other things we can do.' And the violence dropped – and we still have this program going on at the L.A. County Jail.” That's just one of the ways Bill says that new approaches to criminals can be both more humane and more effective. The need to train correctional officers in alternative kinds of intervention is huge.

"Once you get prisoners behind bars you can't always handcuff 'em – it's just not the best thing to do every time," he said. "You need to deal with them a lot of ways, and the ones that use physical harm aren't always the best.” That's especially true when dealing with prisoners who are also mentally ill: knowing when to treat them like prisoners, and when to treat them like patients, is a distinction that it's hard to make without training.

'I'm giving the guards classes so that they know how to handle an inmate who's acting up because of a mental illness without necessarily beating them to a pulp, which is often what happens without that kind of training – and it's usually not necessary.”

As he begins his dissertation, Bill is looking ahead to teaching: once he has his PhD he intends to use his new knowledge and his years of experience to teach the next generation of prison and mental health administrators how to avoid the mistakes of the past.

"It's been a long time dream of mine to be able to finish my PhD and teach," he says. "It's a lifelong dream."

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