Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison

Appendix B. - The Institutional Lives of Catastrophic Jails and Prisons in the United States,1990–2007

APPENDIX B The Institutional Lives of Catastrophic Jails and Prisons in the United States, 1990–2007 The information in this appendix comes from systematic searches of the Nexus news database between 1990 and 2007. The analysis was designed to learn more about recent institutional failures in prisons and jails from around the United States. While many of the articles I discovered did not provide the kind of sociological insight I was looking for—that is, many focused on isolated incidents—several excellent in-depth investigative reports provided me with thicker descriptions of institutional problems associated with penal health bureaucracies in the contemporary United States. Obviously, I cannot claim that these “snapshots”of institutional failure prove my contention that there has been an in›ux in the last thirty years in the number of penal institutions that can justi‹ably be called “catastrophic.” But I do believe that the reports at least suggest this observation. southwest Arizona There are numerous reports of institutional failures in Arizona’s penal institutions , including the normalization of deviant practices at Sheriff Joseph Arpaio’s notorious tent city jails. Between 1993 and 1996, eleven prisoners died in custody in Maricopa County’s infamous Ward 41. According to a report in the Phoenix New Times, one prisoner, Jose Rodriquez died of untreated heroin detoxi‹cation, “curled up on a mattress on a concrete ›oor, his head resting in his own vomit.”1 The report stated that despite being surrounded by hundreds of people, including trained medical personnel, Rodriquez was ignored and accused of faking his ailment. Texas Although prison health care in Texas has been touted as “a model for the nation ,” a 2001 investigative report conducted by journalists from the Houston Press documented the negative ‹ndings of recent state audits.2 The audits revealed medical personnel discouraging prisoners from obtaining medication, 177 doctors at local prison units routinely ignoring the assessments of health specialists , a rise in infectious diseases (e.g., hepatitis, tuberculosis, and drug-resistant staph), and serious lapses in treatment for HIV and AIDS. Moreover, according to the report, an audit of prisoner deaths in the state in 1998 concluded that twenty of the inmates “received poor or very poor care” and that the deaths of sixteen of those twenty inmates were either “preventable” or “possibly preventable.”3 south Arkansas An audit of Correctional Medical Services, conducted by the U.S. Justice Department between July and September of 2002, found that Arkansas prisoners did not receive proper referral or follow-up services and that medical services were grossly understaffed, lacked supervision, and failed to consistently implement medical policies and protocols.4 Florida In January 2007, the Pinellas County Jail, a Florida facility built to hold twenty-four hundred men and women, held a population of thirty-eight hundred prisoners. One investigator reported: Hundreds must sleep in portable beds on the ›oor, often next to toilets or beneath sinks. The in‹rmary, designed for 44, usually has 70 to 80 inmates a day. Those with nonessential medical needs often wait months to be treated. When a contagious disease such as chickenpox breaks out, the staff quarantines the entire cellblock and lets the disease run its course.5 west Colorado As of 2002, three thousand Colorado prisoners had tested positive for hepatitis C, but only thirty-four received any drug therapy. A report in the Denver Westword pro‹led one prisoner, Terry Akers, who was denied treatment. Last spring his stomach became grossly distended, as if he were carrying a beach ball under his shirt. At ‹rst the doctors suspected a bacterial infection , but it was ascites, an accumulation of ›uid that is one of the common symptoms of cirrhosis. The veins in his esophagus also became painfully swollen. The DOC’s internal medicine specialist said he’d seen worse. After dinner a couple of months ago, Akers began to vomit blood. 178 appendixes A physician’s assistant responded to his distress call, looked in his toilet and decided, yep, that was a lot of blood . . . Terry Akers’s esophogeal varices had ruptured in ‹ve places, requiring surgery.6 Utah An investigation of the Point of the Mountain prison in Utah revealed gross neglect of prisoners with mental illness. According to a 1997 report in the Salt Lake Tribune, prison staff routinely used a device known as “the chair” as a means for brutally controlling mentally ill prisoners. Many are stripped naked and hooked...