Restraint chairs are meant to keep prisoners from harming themselves or others. So why are so many inmates dying while they're strapped into them?
Of all the methods prison guards use to subdue combative inmates—from stun guns to rubber bullets—immobilizing an unruly prisoner in a restraint chair seems like a fairly innocent method. Guards position the inmate in the chair and use nylon straps to secure the inmate’s legs, chest, wrists and shoulders. It might be crude, but it’s effective.
But the reality is far more complicated: A chair that was created to ensure a prisoner’s safety may actually be having the opposite effect. Prisoner advocates blame officer abuse for a rash of deaths and injuries with the chairs, but in many of the cases, it is prisoners themselves—some with mental illness—that have done the harm to themselves.
The chairs were first introduced into American jails in the mid 1990s. In the beginning, some prisoners and jail personnel created lighthearted nicknames for the chair, including the ”strap-o-lounger.” But other inmates—and particularly their lawyers—have begun to use altogether different nicknames for the chair. They now call it the “torture chair,” or the “slave chair.” Some even call it the “devil’s chair.”
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