The family of a 21-year-old woman who hanged herself while in prison at the Oahu Community Correctional Center has sued the state corrections department, alleging the agency failed to provide adequate mental health treatment despite two previous suicide attempts.

Joycelyn Simeona, mother of Diamond Simeona-Agoo, filed the wrongful death suit last week against the Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. 

Simeona is also seeking damages from the department’s director and the former and current health care administrators. She says the defendants failed to provide Simeona-Agoo with adequate mental health treatment.

“Defendants’ long-standing pattern and practice of neglect has directly caused serious and ongoing irreparable harm to Ms. Simeona-Agoo and contributes to a revolving door of incarceration that is both costly and detrimental to public safety,” her complaint reads.

By the time Simeona-Agoo hanged herself in June of 2022, she had already attempted suicide twice and had been diagnosed with anxiety, depression and psychotic and unspecific personality disorders, Simeona says. Still, despite repeatedly informing staff of her suicidal tendencies, Simeona says that her daughter did not receive any mental health services.

Instead, Simeona-Agoo was placed into disciplinary segregation shortly after being released from suicide watch. She hanged herself later that evening.

“No explanation was ever provided for why Ms. Simeona-Agoo was taken off suicide watch and returned to general population and then immediately placed in segregation,” the complaint says.

Simeona alleges the department has a history of inadequate mental health care for its inmates, arguing that the department fails to respond to inmates’ mental health needs in a timely manner and to take basic suicide prevention measures. Mentally ill inmates are also routinely placed in segregation due to a lack of staff, Simeona says, sometimes for as long as 24 hours a day.

“They’ve been told in the past that putting people in lockdown or isolation who already have some sort of indications of mental illness or stress are particularly and peculiarly susceptible to harming themselves, but they continue to do it,” said Eric Seitz, Simeona’s lawyer.

Tommy Johnson, the department’s director, says otherwise.

Inmates “can receive punishment for misconduct, but if we can link the misconduct to their mental health illness, then that’s taken into account and that’s addressed in a therapeutic way as opposed to a punitive,” he said last week.

Still, the department’s approach to mental health has been under scrutiny for many years. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against what was then called the Department of Public Safety for its “deliberate indifference to the mental health needs” of detainees at OCCC.

Following the lawsuit, the department was kept under federal oversight until 2015, when OCCC’s level of care was deemed to meet DOJ standards. Once DOJ discontinued this oversight, OCCC’s mental health services rapidly declined, Simeona says, in part due to a lack of staff and proper training.

Johnson confirmed that the corrections department struggles with staffing. There are currently around 400 vacancies for adult correctional positions across Hawaii, as well as an additional 340 or so vacancies for other positions, he says.

Despite these shortages, Seitz says that the department continues to try and serve people — including mentally ill people — in state prisons, as the state hospital is already overcrowded.

“They basically just cram them into modules and only give them sort of minimal care, even when they know that these people are prone to very severe stress and are likely to engage in self-abusive or even suicidal behaviors,” Seitz said.

For Johnson, his agency’s struggles to care for people who are “determined to kill themselves” are not any different than other jurisdictions across the U.S.

“No jails in the country are designed to handle people who are seriously and persistently mentally ill,” he said.