“Put your hand in the cold water there. What’s it feel like? Does it feel cold? ‘Yea. It does.’ When you put your hand in the water, do you hear any voices? ‘Well, No, they’re gone.”’ Schizophrenia, among other mental illnesses dictate the lives of many individuals who are in the criminal justice system.
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Joe Pishioneri, deputy sheriff at the Lane County Jail, has worked in law enforcement since 1986, lived in Springfield, Ore., since 1980, and done everything from civil service, to everyday cop work, to running mental health services at the jail. Dealing with the overwhelming numbers of mentally ill inmates constitutes the jail’s biggest challenge. He describes one technique used on delusional inmates:
“When they can get back in touch with reality, the feeling of their own body, the cold of the water, they can start to see the voices aren’t real,” Pishioneri says. “You can’t agree with them to make them sit down, you have to tell them the truth.”
He walks into the coffee shop across the street from the jail, with a stainless steel travel mug in one hand and leather bound organizer in the other. His black wool button down coat goes to knees, and his salt and pepper hair matches a mustache nestled under his nose. He’s Italian, not more that 5 foot 8, but what he lacks in height he makes up for with his smile. It takes me back to the jail.
Joe met me in the lobby of the bland, concrete- framed facility in downtown Eugene. The home for almost 500 inmates, the dreary place was livened by Joe’s passion and pep. He stayed late that Wednesday night to give me a tour, making his 10-hour day into more like 12.
The mentally ill create the biggest hole for Pishioneri in his confidence in the system. A lot of homeless people he says, choose to be that way, or have opted for homeless because of addiction. But the severely mentally ill, the ones who have no business being on the streets he says … “those are the ones we need to help.” When Joe describes the system he includes education, law enforcement, and the institutions like hospitals and jails-government run facilities. I remember him standing proudly in a large room inside the jail, with a permanent half-smile on his face as he spoke. The room was full of computer monitors and had the feel of an office with a few cubicles and swivel chairs. He said this is where the jail will run its GED program. The funding wasallocated in the newest levy, allowing the jail to hire Lane Community College professors to help inmates earn their high school diploma or equivalent.
“The mentally ill are what we have to do something about,” he says. He tells of the way in which good men can become criminals without the right mental health care. The way that those who are mentally ill need help that they cannot find within themselves. The rest he says, can be helped via the correct funding for a county of this size, with programs to help educate and subsequently employ criminals, which Joe says makes them significantly less likely to offend. It’s the smaller percentage of those severely mentally ill, who are not employable, who Joe wants to help stay out of the cracks in the “system.”
Pishioneri always wanted to be a cop. It started when he was 8 years old, he says, walking home from school in Atwater, Calif., He and his friends Tommy and Eddy Mahoney bounced carelessly down the street with a girl from their class. When the Mahoney brothers veered to go home, Joe and the girl kept on.
Suddenly a driver in a brown Triumph turned the corner near them, pulled a gun on them and opened fire. The shooter missed Joe and his classmate, but yelled a racist slur at the young black girl, Joe’s classmate. Joe shoved her under the low-hanging boughs of a nearby tree and ducked in after her. When the gunfire stopped he ran around the tree and read the man’s license plates, which he wrote in the dirt with a stick.
“She ran off scared and crying, you know?” He chuckles before he tells me: “I went home and watched Gilligan’s Isle.” I laugh as well, singing “A three hour tour,” and remind him of three-hour jail tour that was supposed to be two. He continues his story: When his mom got home from work he informed her. The police arrived to speak with him.
“You’re going to make a great cop someday son,” said the officer after hearing the way he instinctively protected the girl, and retained pertinent information including make and model of the car, its physical appearance, and its license plate number.
“That stuck with me.” There is fire in Joe’s eyes as he tells the story. He ran for Springfield City Council in 2004 and was elected. In 2008 he was re-elected unopposed. He gave up the position to run for state legislature in 2012, a position he lost by a slim margin.
Empathy drives him. The dead, he says, he has to disassociate with. The times he has encountered dead bodies have taught him to treat them as bodies only. The mentally ill he says, have the opposite affect on him. He talks about the way he wishes the entire system could work together to help the mentally ill get what they need and to.
Joe and I have different political affiliations. I am the exact same age as his daughter. I am Hispanic, and his heritage is Italian, He grew up a child of military man, and his parents remain married. We differ in age, gender and ethnicity. We differ in upbringing and life experience.
The same thread, though, strings through us both. That of humanity and empathy. Empathy for the empathetic. A love for people despite their inability to love. “I feel sad sometimes that I have things that they don’t. And they could have,” he says about inmates who he believes could have made a few different turns and had a life unencumbered by criminality.
Joe.
A guy with privilege.
A guy who made all the right moves.
I picture him pushing papers in an office inside the cold walls of LCJ. Going home to his wife, free to come and go as he pleases. As we rise to leave he takes my coffee and trashes it, commenting that it’s cold. I smile at hispresumptuousness, which I forgive as an endearing fatherly trait. I walk outside with him where damp Northwest air touches our faces. We say our goodbyes and I watch him walk back toward his place of privilege in the building where for the inmates, privilege is almost nonexistent. The place that offers freedom and financial security for Joe is also a place where, for nearly 500 people, freedom is just an abstract idea.
Tags: Ayshlee Koontz, LANE COUNTY JAIL
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