Death Behind Bars (3/24/05)
The United States has about 2.1 million people behind bars - a larger proportion of its population than any other nation in the world. The correctional system's price tag is more than $60 billion - up from just $9 billion two decades ago - and states are understandably eager to shave costs. Some are attempting to do it by cutting back on already dismal prison medical care.
Prison inmates are literally the sickest people in our society. States and municipalities frequently try to dodge the bill for treating them by ordering up bids from private providers and signing up with the cheapest, most bare-bones plan. Paul von Zielbauer of The Times recently opened a window onto this aspect of the problem with a harrowing series of articles about Prison Health Services, the nation's largest private provider of jail and prison medical care, handling about one in every 10 people who live behind bars in this country.
Among the horrific deaths described in the series is that of Brian Tetrault, a 44-year-old man with Parkinson's disease who died after an upstate New York jail's medical director drastically cut his medicine. Officials then falsified records to make it appear that Mr. Tetrault had been released before he died. Another upstate inmate, 35-year-old Victoria Williams Smith, died of a heart attack after being mocked by a prison nurse and denied treatment for days. Equally as troubling were accounts of how Prison Health Services failed to keep a close eye on inmates who later committed suicide and its habit of sometimes employing doctors with criminal records and doctors who lacked state certification.
Read full article at:
www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/opinion/10thu2.html?th
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