Things like this are more common than you think. There was a doctor fired from one of the prisons I worked who refused to see a patient and he died. It was the second time. I had an encounter with her when I saw a patient who told me he thought an abdominal surgical wound was infected. I looked at it, and green pus was oozing out of it. I sent him across the hall to her. She did nothing for the man, then she came across the hall and reamed me out for sending him to her. She demanded that I remove my note from the chart, but I refused. She went completely ballistic. I called my supervising MD and he said, 'just keep doing what you are doing.' The next morning when I came in the social worker who helped me with clinic told me the man had died during the night. A couple months later she refused to see another one and the nurses strongly advised her to see the man. Here response without having seen him, 'he's faking.' The nurses got in gear and got her fired.
This is unacceptable. It doesn't matter what the person's crime is. That doesn't even figure into the picture. Medical care in jails and prison by law is supposed to meet the community standard. Guards and officers are supposed to be trained to identify a medical emergency. The fact that the person cannot go for help on his own is an exacerbating factor in an incident like this.
Everything you've described here, along with every other problem I've read and heard about in the contemporary American prison system, seems to be a direct or indirect result of overcrowded conditions.
MSNBC has been running a continuing reality series on weekends called,
Lockup. Each episode of this series is filmed in a different state prison. In every example I've watched the staff seems clearly overwhelmed by the sheer number of inmates they are required to supervise and control. It also appears to me that most if not all of the places which are called prisons, or "correctional facliities," are functioning mainly as de facto mental institutions where America's violent crazies are confined.
These overcrowded conditions probably are the result of three separate circumstances:
1) Ronald Reagan's closing of federally subsidized mental hospitals.
2) The redundant effects of the wholly counterproductive drug war.
3) Unrestrained expansion of the Prison Industrial Complex, which in fact is the only remaining American growth industry.
What are your thoughts about that?
