THE BROTHER
Who transformed family tragedy into prison reform campaign The story gets sadder at every twist as Pete Scherer ’09 tells it, sitting at a long, bare table in his attorney’s office, hands clasped before him. It’s about what happened to his brother Carl, younger by 11 years, a “gentle soul” 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. In 1995, on the advice of his public defender, Carl pleaded guilty to criminal charges after the owner of a car he’d 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. 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 Parole was revoked in 1998.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. There, with inconsistent and ineffective treatment under the supervision of the prison system – not an organization with a primary focus on mental health care – 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 – a situation not unlike “dropping a goldfish into a shark pond,” as it was later described in legal correspondence
16 | crossroads | summer 2011
with the Scherer family. On the morning of August 6, 2002, Carl’s descent through the cracks of the system reached it’s tragic conclusion. After quarrelling over their morning breakfast rations, Carl’s cellmate beat him to death. “It was deeply painful. I didn’t know how to cope or deal with the pain,” said Scherer, an electrical technician at Armstrong World Industries, where he’s worked for three decades.
“I admire Pete’s dedication, combined with his real world, pragmatic understanding of the possibilities." A month after Carl died, an ad for the Lancaster Area Victim Offender Reconciliation Program caught Pete’s eye. He trained to become a mediator with the organization, and in the process, decided to finish his bachelor’s degree. The following February, he entered the management and organizational development program at EMU’s Lancaster site. But Carl’s death, and the systemic failures it made achingly clear, hovered over Pete. With more than 20 percent of Pennsylvania’s 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.
So Pete sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in federal court, alleging that it had violated Carl’s constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment by neglecting to properly treat Carl’s mental illness while he was in custody. His intention was never to exact simple retribution, or simply seek compensatory damages. No, Pete wanted to “light a candle in the darkness.” He wanted Carl’s 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. 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 “provide hope and support for mentally ill offenders and their families.” 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’s 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’s 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.) 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’s been frustrated by the