{"id":658,"date":"2011-08-09T17:20:31","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T21:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/crossroads\/?p=658"},"modified":"2012-04-17T14:40:48","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T18:40:48","slug":"the-brother-who-transformed-family-tragedy-into-prison-reform-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/2011\/08\/09\/the-brother-who-transformed-family-tragedy-into-prison-reform-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brother Who Transformed Family Tragedy into Prison Reform Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story gets sadder at every twist as Pete Scherer \u201909 tells it, sitting at a long, bare table in his attorney\u2019s office, hands clasped before him.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about what happened to his brother Carl, younger by 11 years, a \u201cgentle soul\u201d and a talented musician with a promising career ahead of him. Carl was in his mid-20s when the first symptoms of mental illness became apparent, so severe his life began to unravel. Carl struggled to keep a job. His musical ambitions were interrupted.<\/p>\n

In 1995, on the advice of his public defender, Carl pleaded guilty to criminal charges after the owner of a car he\u2019d borrowed reported the vehicle stolen. He served a three-month sentence followed by a period of parole. All the while, his illness continued to get worse.<\/p>\n

While still under parole, Carl began placing strange phone calls to numbers picked at random from the phone book. More criminal charges followed. Parole was revoked in 1998. With a clear history of serious mental illness, and without having ever committed a violent crime, Carl entered the state corrections system on a two- to six-year sentence.<\/p>\n

There, with inconsistent and ineffective treatment under the supervision of the prison system \u2013 not an organization with a primary focus on mental health care \u2013 Carl entered a final downward spiral. He acted erratically, antagonized other inmates, got written up for misconduct and wound up in the Restricted Housing Unit, where he shared a seven- by nine-foot cell with an inmate who had a violent past. The two were allowed outside the cell no more than five hours per week \u2013 a situation not unlike \u201cdropping a goldfish into a shark pond,\u201d as it was later described in legal correspondence with the Scherer family.<\/p>\n

On the morning of August 6, 2002, Carl\u2019s descent through the cracks of the system reached it\u2019s tragic conclusion. After quarrelling over their morning breakfast rations, Carl\u2019s cellmate beat him to death. \u201cIt was deeply painful. I didn\u2019t know how to cope or deal with the pain,\u201d said Scherer, an electrical technician at Armstrong World Industries, where he\u2019s worked for three decades.<\/p>\n

A month after Carl died, an ad for the Lancaster Area Victim Offender Reconciliation Program caught Pete\u2019s eye. He trained to become a mediator with the organization, and in the process, decided to finish his bachelor\u2019s degree. The following February, he entered the management and organizational development program at EMU\u2019s Lancaster site.<\/p>\n

But Carl\u2019s death, and the systemic failures it made achingly clear, hovered over Pete. With more than 20 percent of Pennsylvania\u2019s 50,000 prisoners suffering from some kind of mental illness, the next incident, and then the next and the next, were waiting to happen. Something had to be done.<\/p>\n

So Pete sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in federal court, alleging that it had violated Carl\u2019s constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment by neglecting to properly treat Carl\u2019s mental illness while he was in custody. His intention was never to exact simple retribution, or simply seek compensatory damages.<\/p>\n

No, Pete wanted to \u201clight a candle in the darkness.\u201d He wanted Carl\u2019s death to keep the next Carl from dying, and days before the action went to trial, the parties reached a remarkable settlement: the Department of Corrections agreed to launch an effort to reform its treatment of inmates suffering from mental illness.<\/p>\n

In July 2009, an advisory board including Pete, mental health advocates and Department of Corrections staff formed Support for Inmates with Mental Illness, or SIMI, with a mission to \u201cprovide hope and support for mentally ill offenders and their families.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group has since launched a pilot program to facilitate better communication between inmates with mental illness, their families, corrections staff and mental health workers at Pennsylvania\u2019s Waymart prison, with a goal of coordinating effective care and support for mentally ill inmates. (On a related note, for a senior project at Penn State University, Pete\u2019s daughter, Antoinette, helped conduct a survey of mental health workers within the state corrections system, which identified specific areas with potential for improvement in the way the department handles inmates with mental illness.)<\/p>\n

Two years into the SIMI effort, Pete has been encouraged by enthusiastic response from individual psychologists and other staff within the Department of Corrections. At the same time, he\u2019s been frustrated by theslow pace of change within the organization as a whole. It\u2019s a challenge with direct bearing on Pete\u2019s degree in organizational development from EMU.<\/p>\n

\"Pete

Pete Scherer (left), with lawyer Dwight Yoder, applied what he learned in ADCP about organizational development to pressure the prison system to change.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe [department] as a whole has a lot of great people, but someone at the level of a psychologist doesn\u2019t have any input up or down to change the process,\u201d said Pete, who is convinced that a less linear, hierarchical decision-making system could vastly improve state prisons\u2019 treatment of mentally ill inmates without adding to its budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a classic organizational development issue that can be addressed with the right strategy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Over the past two years, Pete, sometimes accompanied by Antoinette and wife Marceline, has travelled across Pennsylvania meeting with corrections staff and others involved, driven by his desire to improve the situation of the state\u2019s inmates with mental illness and their families.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to translate [the family\u2019s] dedication into real initiatives within the Department of Corrections that will enhance family contact and communications for our most seriously mentally ill offenders,\u201d said Dr. Jack Walmer, a retired Chief of Psychological Services with the Department of Corrections who\u2019s worked closely with Pete on the SIMI project. \u201cI admire Pete\u2019s dedication, combined with his real world, pragmatic understanding of the possibilities and, at times, limitations of moving ahead with a new initiative such as this.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much has happened in less than a decade, yet there is still so much to do. Pete, who is also a real estate agent in addition to his full-time work with Armstrong, keeps spending his spare time crisscrossing the state, developing and promoting SIMI. And progress does continue to come, in bits and pieces. In June, the Department of Corrections decided to start a second SIMI pilot program at Muncy State Correctional Institution, a women\u2019s prison.<\/p>\n

And the fact that SIMI exists at all, according to Dwight Yoder, the attorney who represented Pete in his suit against the state prison system, is a testament to Pete\u2019s vision for something good to emerge from his brother’s mishandling and brutal death.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeter was able to use Carl\u2019s death to bring healing to his own family and a lot of other families through this program,\u201d said Yoder. \u201cThrough [Carl\u2019s] death, the Department of Corrections is on a path to change how it deals with inmates with mental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story gets sadder at every twist as Pete Scherer \u201909 tells it, sitting at a long, bare table in his attorney\u2019s office, hands clasped before him. It\u2019s about what happened to his brother Carl, younger by 11 years, a \u201cgentle soul\u201d and a talented musician with a promising career ahead of him. Carl was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11,61,161],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","tag-adcp","tag-emu-lancaster","tag-pete-scherer","issues-summer-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1136,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/1136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}