When your incarcerated and you watch people around you suffer from the staff nurses’ neglect of treatable health problems because of complete disregard or lack of concern, you begin to question the type of care you may receive if you were in a critical situation. The amount of mistrust between staff and inmates is absolutely reprehensible and this mistrust is deadly when it bleeds into the relationships medical professionals have with their patient, convict or not. Especially seeing how staff are the only source that inmates have to rely on in order to get immediate care or be referred to treatment. The stakes are heightened for incarcerated individuals under the weight of their sentence, the volatility of their environment and concerns for the well being of their families. Having a health problem in this situation is deadly. Not only because it puts inmates at risk of being targeted by inmates with ill intentions but mainly because penitentiaries are not equipped to treat health issues.
Penitentiary Healthcare is Breeding Ground for Medical Mistreatment
Nurses who work in prisons are not trained to treat health issues, their most valuable task is to operate as referral agents, because they are not even qualified to diagnose inmates. Many nurses are in training and without the qualifications to identify symptoms, prescribe treatment or medication. Within these limitations many ailments are shrugged off as faults of the prisoner, rather than completing tests to identify the source of a health problem patients are told to stop smoking or work out less. In environments where prisoners have little to no ability to control their food intake and where sickness can spread like a California wildfire, risk to public safety through health threats should be taken much more seriously. Instead prisoners are charged for each of their nurse visits, discouraging from going. This mandatory change is even enforced during their mandatory annual birthday checkup, and during these visits instead of being refereed to qualified doctors when a potential health concern is identified, prisoners are sent back out into the population to schedule another costly nurse visit with no progress being made towards restoring their health. Time is wasted and the severity of their concerns increase.
Untrained workers experiment on incarcerated individuals. Those who aren’t qualified receive their training on a population unable to opt-out of being treated by someone with little to no experience. A comrade informed me of his being persuaded to get several fillings during a dental exam for which he had to pay and didn’t even need. His mother was outraged to see all the unnecessary silver in her son’s mouth during their visit. Healthcare workers use the vulnerable prison population to ‘practice’ unnecessary procedures on unknowing human candidates. Inmates are treated as collateral in every sense and businesses exploit their inability to choose their own doctors, dentists or optometrists in an open market. This makes for the perfect arena for staff and private companies to mistreat inmates and make a ton of money circling sick patients around until they reach their death bed and then finally referring them to a hospital. This happened in the case of Michigan inmate John Richard Stein whose complaints of chest pains for months weren’t taken seriously until he finally collapsed in his cell and was later declared dead at a nearby hospital. This is the case for far to many inmates. While Corizon sits comfy on five-year, $715.7-million contracts to provide health care to state prisoners, inmates and their families are painfully undone by this unbearable reality that looks like a death sentence to those who will be in desperate need of care and yet neglected and disregarded.
1 Rich Company for over 330,000 Poor Patients
Corizon Healthcare earning $1.5 billion annually from their presence in 26 of the United States. I say their ‘presence’ in these states because they do very little to serve the more than 332,000 inmates that are limited to depending completely on their dental, mental health, optometry, substance abuse treatment as well as general healthcare.The fact that any state is willing to maintain a contract with this company after the many incidents of indifference, neglect and death of inmates under their staff’s care is deplorable. A large sum of the $1.5 billion annual income that Corizon receives is directly from the inmates because inmates are charged for each visit that they have with these nurses, even when they’re not diagnosed, refereed, or prescribed with any medications. They’re charged for simply having contact with the nurse. Many prisoners feel as though the staff responsible for their healthcare do not care at all if their health deteriorates or even if they die. This is an unsettling feeling. To think that the people in our families are dependent on the care of people who are unconcerned about their well being is infuriating. Inmates with persistent chest pain are sent back to population until they’re near death. When they are finally sent to the hospital it is as a last ditch effort rather than being a preventative measure.
In 2015, a man incarcerated in Michigan’s Department of Corrections complained of chest pains for months until he passed finally passed away. Nurses are said to act with ‘deliberate indifference’ in response to prisoners’ health concerns. The fact that inmates have no one else to turn to makes the situation even more dangerous. Out here, people switch doctors if they have to wait in the lobby too long past their assigned appointment time, they can go on google in search for another one of the nearest clinics and they can call without worrying about a 1 minute warning from the phone operator after 14 minutes. Prisoners are lucky if their concern is taken seriously enough during their first and its a miracle for them to receive an additional examination or a test that targets the specific symptoms their experiencing so that they can reach a concrete diagnosis. Prisoners are human and deserve to have their healthcare taken seriously by the professionals who are responsible for their well being.
Nurses Display Routine Deliberate Indifference
Prisons have created an environment that demonize the inmates on a morally dangerous level. Prisoners aren’t trusted even with their own health and this is a critical situation. Inmates constitutional rights states the right “to be free from deliberate indifference to his known serious medical needs” and this deliberate indifference is practiced as a part of the medical ‘services’ routine in prisons. This is simply because prisoners lives aren’t valued by the nurses they depend on. Human life is to be taken with seriousness regardless of its current place in society. We must understand that regardless of what label an individual is tagged with, they are still a precious member of man kind as someone’s father, son, brother and at the very least a dear friend to someone. The potential of a life is endless. The inmates we allow to suffer unnecessarily until their preventable death could have created the next pivotal invention, developed an influential community center or saved another life. For example, Blacks of the slavery era created the vast majority of the inventions that we could never do without today from the steamboat propeller to the cotton gin. It’s those on the margins of society that dicover the next big thing as we’re forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel for our own we discover the answers to the needs others never realized existed.
As we continue to fight for legislation to end mass incarceration, such as the passing of Michigan’s Good Time Bill, I will continue to identify the many reasons why prisons have no place within a humane society. Prisons are breeding grounds for inhuman, exploitative and perverse conditions in every facet of life, including healthcare. The use of Good Time credits to adjust the length of prisoners’ sentences based on their behavior aleviates the burdens on healthcare professionals in the prisons which reduces over crowding and gives inmates more access to dependable medical care. We’ve already seen the inhumane conditions for which prisoners should be released, especially those who’ve already demonstrated their rehabilitation for which these conditions would work against their rehabilitation. Representatives are working on revising the bill in the House in order to move it forward to the Senate, the bill has attempted to move forward but has been sent for revision within the Law and Justice Committee. Our role within this process is to call Law and Justice Committee Members, mainly committee chair, Klint Kesto who can be reached by phone at 517-373-1799 and email at KlintKesto@house.mi.gov.
