Brooklyn Hogrell’s mother says our prison agency failed her
Jennifer Rodriguez estimates that her daughter, Brooklyn Hogrell, spent 85% of her time in prison struggling with depression. Hogrell could feel a depressive episode coming on, Rodriguez said. When she did, she would become desperate and cut her arms and plead with corrections officers to be moved to a psychiatric ward. And she would call her mother on her prison-issued tablet.
Brooklyn dropped into another episode in early April but this time she couldn’t talk to her mother. Her tablet had been taken away by prison authorities as punishment for engaging in a three-person call, Rodriguez said. Rodriguez tried to reassure Brooklyn with multiple texts each day, texts that prison workers would print out and deliver.
Rodriguez said Hogrell had struggled with severe depression, anxiety, and PTSD since being raped at the age of 8 in her hometown of Abilene. Hogrell received counseling and psychiatric care but was arrested as a 13-year-old for marijuana possession and placed in a Texas Youth Commission detention facility the next year for violating parole. This initiated a series of clashes with corrections officials culminating in a 10-year sentence for assaulting a public servant.
“It was way worse to be in than to be out in general population,” Rodriguez said. “They would go weeks without even being taken to shower. They would go weeks without getting out of their cell for rec or anything. And even people that don’t have mental health issues, they begin having mental health problems, depression or anxiety, because you’re locked into a little room for so long.
Suicide Texas Department Of Criminal Justice Texas Justice Initiative
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