Terry Kupers

Terry Allen Kupers is an American psychiatrist who is best known as an expert on mental health care in correctional settings and on the harm caused by long-term solitary confinement. He was born in Philadelphia in 1943 and grew up in Los Angeles. He studied psychology at Stanford, took his medical degree at the UCLA School of Medicine in 1968, trained in psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and spent an elective year at the Tavistock Institute in England studying object relations theory and brief psychotherapy. His interests span psychoanalytic psychotherapy, forensic psychiatry and community mental health. Since 1977 he has given expert testimony in large class action cases over jail and prison conditions, including Rutherford v. Pitchess and Ashker v. Brown. He is Professor Emeritus at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and has written six books, among them Prison Madness and Solitary, and edited two more.