The Sickening Truth - Why and How the Prisoners are Dying !

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Thursday, November 17, 2005 2:43 AM

The Sickening Truth - Why and How the Prisoners are Dying !!!

 

 

 

American Chronicle

 

B. Cayenne Bird is a 37-year veteran journalist who volunteers her

time as founder and director of United for No Injustice, Oppression or

Neglect UNION. The UNION is active in prison reform and criminal

justice issues. She is a mother and grandmother and focuses on human

rights and restorative justice. She is also the host of television

series " Cayenne Common Sense " and publishes a daily online newsletter.

She doesn't have a current photo

 

 

 

The sickening details - Why and how the Prisoners are dying

 

by. B. Cayenne Bird

 

 

On a daily basis for more than seven years I have been alerting other

journalists and the legislators that the prisoners are dying

preventable deaths. We have nineteen families in our UNION group who

have lost a son or daughter to the unbearable callousness and

incompetence of the prison bureaucracy.

 

 

When we were simply begging for help to prevent some of these deaths,

medical neglect wasn't a topic that anyone wanted to recognize, let

alone remedy. But when we were able to find lawyers to file six

lawsuits in the past year, then and only then, did reform become a

higher priority.

 

 

Headlines in the major newspapers the past two days state that a

prison healthcare emergency exists in general terms. But since I know

the specifics surrounding a number of the prisoner deaths, I feel

compelled to share the systemic dysfunction that just never seems to

make it to public view let alone get corrected.

 

 

The crisis exists in part due to the short staffing problems and poor

salaries.

 

The number one reason that the prisoners are dying preventable deaths

is that there are too many people in prison. Due to ridiculous harsh

laws against non violent people, the overcrowding reached inhumane

levels about three years ago but it's such a large industry that

nobody wants to address an immediate release of non violent prisoners,

which is exactly what is in order and what other states have done in

response to similar problems.

 

 

The physical conditions have turned prisons into disease incubators.

There aren't enough doctors and nurses who could bear to witness and

work in such an environment. Numerous medical workers have told me

they would never participate in such gross inhumanity and squalor as

it exists now in most prisons statewide.

 

 

Even the Women's prisons, designed for four have as many as ten

females jammed into one space. If one gets sick, they all get

infected. The men are living in day rooms and gymnasiums with bunks

18 " part stacked three high. There are only a few toilets for hundreds

of men, a horrible recipe for people with the diarrhea common with

Hepatitis and other diseases.

 

Here's how a few prisoners have died in cases that I know well.

 

 

At California State Prison Solano, Anthony Shumake died of a dental

infection which was neglected for too long. Apparently, CDC hadn't

been paying their bills and the ambulance driver was forced to drive

him to a hospital located hours away from the prison. In this day and

age, a healthy young man dying from a dental infection is an outrage.

But it happened. It is not unusual for ambulances to take up to two

hours to arrive. On the week ends ambulances aren't called at all for

prisoners who don't have the money to pay for them, which would

include the majority of inmates. A helicopter always comes to

transport the guards when they are hurt, but not the inmates. The

prison clinics have no defibrillators and very little else in the way

of equipment to save lives.

 

 

Also at CSP Solano, Ersel Ware, a man in his 50's fell down on the

handball court on a hot day. Another prisoner who was experienced in

giving CPR tried to help him but the guards ordered him away at

gunpoint. You see, most of the guards themselves are not trained in

basic first aid or CPR and if a prisoner falls to the ground, he is

simply left there to die until help shows up. This typically takes at

least l/2 hour but can take up to two hours. By that time, the

prisoner is dead. The emergency response policies differ from prison

to prison but one thing they all have in common is that they are

primitive.

 

 

With the salaries the guards are paid, it should be mandated that

they not only have CPR and basic first aid training but that they use

these skills when a prisoner falls instead of just watching them die

with no assistance.

 

 

California Medical Facility, Vacaville is located next door to CSP

Solano and is touted as one of the two hospitals for prisoners in the

State. Donald Swisher, a young 34 year old mentally ill prisoner died

there of simple pneumonia because nobody would listen to either him or

his cellmate about the black mucous that he was coughing up. Donald

Swisher died because nobody cared and all the desperate pleas for help

fell on deaf ears. Imagine a healthy young man, except for brain

damage he sustained during an accident, dying of simple pneumonia in

2004. He leaves behind a mother and five little children who will

never forget this grave injustice. The mentally ill are almost never

taken seriously or respected enough to get medical care when they ask

for it throughout the " system "

 

 

There have been multiple deaths such as Harvey Cuffs who went to the

prison medical clinic at CMF Vacaville several times asking for

emergency help but are turned away after being told that it takes at

least two weeks to be seen by a doctor. Harvey cuffs was gravely ill

and should not have been in prison in the first place, let alone left

to die alone on the cold concrete floor of a prison cell. But that is

what happened. The Reporter wrote about it but nothing has improved at

CMF Vacaville despite the lawsuits and multiple stories about

preventable deaths. I am aware of this scenario of being denied

emergency care which predictably results in death numerous times.

 

 

At least half the prisoners have a life threatening illness such as

Hepatitis, AIDS or TB and yet almost nothing is being done to prevent

the spread of these diseases. The prisoners are not given disinfectant

with which to clean their filthy cells outside of a couple of

teaspoons of scrubbing powder each week. Can't have that, the

prisoners having disinfectant, they might hurt the guards with it. But

what the filth combined with the overcrowding hurts is the prisoners.

Even the kitchens often have no paper towels or disinfectant, no soap

in the restrooms and the prisoners who serve food are not carefully

screened for TB or Hepatitis.

 

 

The laundry comes back smelling of urine because it is urine. The

washers and dryers are so overcrammed that the sheets and towels do

not get washed clean. Mixing the laundry of very sick prisoners is a

very stupid thing to do in the first place but not to properly wash

and dry their clothing spreads disease.

 

 

There is almost no preventive health care administered in prisons.

Take a look at their diets. The budget of $2.42 per day per prisoner

hasn't been raised in 15 years and includes almost no citrus or other

fresh foods. Everyday for lunch, prisoners get a high fat mystery meat

sandwich IF they are well enough to walk to breakfast to pick it up.

If they can't make it to the cafeteria because they are too ill, then

nobody feeds them unless the other prisoners bring them scraps of

food. The doctors do not make cell visits.

 

 

I would not put it past CDCR to feed the prisoners infected animals if

they can save a buck on prisoner's food costs and I am concerned. CDCR

claims that citrus isn't given to the prisoners because they can make

liquor called " pruno " with it but the fact is that a packet of catsup

can help brew pruno. Almost anything can be made into alcohol so that

is a poor and unacceptable excuse! Scurvy is a predictable result of

getting no citrus and this practice is unhealthy. Vitamins are never

administered to replace the denied food items.

 

 

There are no special high protein diets for diabetics. Inmate Mark

Grangetto is being starved and denied the high calorie diet that he

needs. His weight is slightly under 100 lbs on a frame of 5'8 " from

this starvation. At one time this past summer, a doctor ordered a 3500

calorie-per-day diet and special nutrition packs to be given to him

throughout the day. For a couple of days he received the feedings then

they stopped. There has been nothing his mother can do to get her

dying son properly fed. This failure to obey doctors orders is more

the rule than the exception throughout the system.

 

 

Grangetto's mother has had no choice but to file a lawsuit after

appealing to Senators, the useless Inspector General, Ombudsmen who

are powerless to help her. Even writing to the warden and chief

medical officer has resulted in nothing but having her son put in his

wheelchair, taken to the shower and beaten up by a guard at Corcoran

State Prison for complaining. That's how the guards handle prisoners

who complain about medical problems – they beat them up, verbally

abuse them, tear up their 602's. Nobody cares or does anything about it.

 

 

Grangetto, though gravely ill with diabetes and hepatitis was cast

without a wheelchair into the SHU (isolated Security Housing Units)

this summer in retaliation for his mother filing a lawsuit and he

nearly died there until we threatened to picket the prison and he was

briefly hospitalized.

 

 

The atrocities of medical neglect and outright abuse that Mark

Grangetto has suffered at several prisons is well documented and this

lawsuit will be a real eye-opener for the public. But it won't save

Mark. His life expectancy is short due to a long pattern of medical

neglect that is slowly killing him.

 

 

Diabetics in prison are all suffering, not being properly fed and the

damage that out of control blood sugar does to their bodies over the

course of time is deadly. But nobody cares enough to actually start

feeding them properly, giving them medications on a regular schedule

and helping them heal.

 

 

At Salinas Valley Prison there is a gross case of medical neglect that

has been going on for 18 months that I know about, probably much

longer. Inmate Randy Baker has seven very painful kidney stones. Three

of them are the size of a golf ball. This is a medical emergency but

repeated appeals to Senators Spieir and Perata, Charles D'Arcy of the

Inspector General's Office (a former prosecutor) , Dr. Rene Kanan,

Internal Affairs, all the many wardens at Salinas Valley the past 18

months and Dr. Lee have still produced no surgery. You see, a surgery

costs money. And the money is at the root of why there is no medical

care available for prisoners like Randy Baker. They sent him for tests

and approved the surgery more than a year ago. But instead of spending

the money to ease his suffering, they just keep sending him for tests.

It's a game. A very inhumane and deadly game.

 

 

Luckily, Randy Baker's parents have the financial resources to file a

lawsuit and have carefully documented everything but that won't save

his life. His pain is so intense that he states he has no quality of

life and he wants to give up. His elderly parents are worried sick and

the strain has nearly killed them too. Still they have no place to go

for help.

 

 

Often times the prisoners die because the guards kill them or set up

other inmates to kill them for a small payoff. Careless double-celling

that will predictably result in death has done just that on multiple

occasions at Lancaster, CMF Vacaville, Pleasant Valley, CSP Solano and

many other prisons. I believe this is a form of medical neglect and

that the wardens and guards who engage in this type of murder should

be prosecuted. While we made some strides this year that the Inspector

General found Warden Michael Harrison for carelessly double-celling

Eddie Arraiga in Lancaster's ad seg responsible for his death, we have

yet to see any criminal charges filed over it. Eddie Arraiga's screams

were heard by all the inmates for more than one hour but no guard ever

came to save him. Harrison is still the warden at Lancaster so this

type of murder of prisoners doesn't seem to be too important.

 

 

When will the prison administrators be held accountable?

 

Warden James Yates of Pleasant Valley Prison ignored the pleas of a

one-armed prisoner double-celled with a severely mentally ill inmate

who had killed his last cellmate too. Even after begging and alerting

the guards that he expected to be killed, Yates still ignored him and

the prisoner died. Who is holding Yates and his bully guards

responsible for this callousness besides God? Why isn't he being

prosecuted?

 

 

There is no accountability for these acts of murder.

 

 

Callousness and deliberate indifference is against the law but not to

a bureaucrat, especially those working in the prisons. The prisoners

are regarded as slaves whose lives have little or no value once they

cannot work for 9 cents an hour. When they die it is a non event.

Their families may be dead or not know how to get together and

organize to give them voice or stand up for them. Many prisoners are

former foster children so they have no family who will fight for them,

for their rights, for their abuses.

 

The legislators all know about the medical crisis. They get tens of

thousands of letters from the 3 million voters related to a state

prisoner (not including those in jails and juvenile halls) They claim

that if they actually read and opened this mail there wouldn't be time

to do anything else. After all, families of prisoners are not a formal

voting group like say the CCPOA or the nurses or teachers who write

big checks.

 

 

The Inspector General Matthew Cate and his staff know when a death is

coming but instead of taking action to save the life of the person

pleading for help, they send back a form letter stating that they get

too much mail.

 

When a prisoner is dying the most he or she can expect is a form

letter stating that no help is available. That really sucks eggs from

a humanitarian standpoint but it also causes millions in lawsuit

payouts for deliberate indifference which outrage every taxpayer.

 

 

We had a call-in for a number of problems including medical neglect to

Roderick Hickman, the man at the top in charge of all prisons just

last week. We figured that maybe Mr. Hickman needed to know we are

upset about all this suffering and dying and other forms of abuse by

the guards and wardens under his management.

 

 

Five of the wives and mothers who called in are not allowed to visit

their loved one in the prison hospital. No American should ever have

to endure this type of sick worry but it is happening to them and

hundreds of others. Stamps and writing paper are unavailable to the

inmates, even if they were strong enough to write so that their

families may know whether or not they dead or alive. What the hell is

going on here! Can there be anything more cruel than this? Cruel to

the prisoners and even crueler to the family members who can't work or

think about anything else besides whether or not their loved one is

surviving.

 

 

What was Hickman's response to all these desperate family members? He

put an answering machine on one of the numbers. Some of his staff told

the family members they were lying. They gave out phone numbers of

fictitious people to call for help including the broadcast host Jenny

Jones. The people calling in were not your typical functionally

illiterate relatives of prisoners. They were doctors, teachers,

nurses, social workers, administrative assistants, pastors and others

who have a prisoner in their families. Yet they were treated by

Hickman and his staff as if their desperate complaints were lies and

totally unimportant. That is why these same people are loading up

their cars to picket his office on Dec 2 from 10 am until they drop,

to draw media attention to this callousness. (1515 " S " Street,

Sacramento Please Join Us because this should never happen in America)

 

 

I have witnessed several cases of unauthorized cremations, fought for

dead bodies to be released to their families for ten days or more, and

discovered at least one funeral home that never even opens the body

bag to check the extent of the injuries before cremating the body.

Most of the families of prisoners are poor, many are elderly and

cremation is their only option since the state will not ship a body to

the family. Two prisoners wrote to us expecting that the guards were

going to kill them. We reported both predictable tragedies but nothing

was done and sure enough, both prisoners ended up dead. One was

classified as " natural causes " and the other was called a suicide. The

Warden at that time Michael Knowles said John Bolander hung himself in

ad seg with a t-shirt after he wrote us that he expected to be killed.

 

 

Now we have a flu epidemic coming. With half the prisoners infected

with other epidemics raging out of control in the prisons, it is

likely they cannot all be vaccinated due to their lowered immune

systems and weakened conditions due to a poor diet and no medical

care. That is if they would even be offered vaccine at all.

 

 

Dr. Rene Kanan has been firing doctors and not replacing them even

though there are temporary agencies that she could be doing this with

so if the flu wipes out half the prisoners, look to her as one of the

key people responsible.

 

 

She has no emergency procedures in place at the prisons in the event

of any natural disaster even if there were enough doctors and nurses

with decent salaries. Four major riots haven't been handled well at

all these past few months.

 

 

I placed a print-out about the possibility of the avian flu pandemic

in everyone's hands who was a key decision maker at Judge Henderson's

hearing this summer when it was just a blip on the radar screen as a

possibility. I suggested as I handed out the article from a major

medical journal that the non-violent prisoners need to be released

immediately as well as those who qualify for compassionate release.

 

 

 

I pointed out that the lawsuits that would follow because people are

housed in gyms and day rooms where humans shouldn't be placed to live

due to vulnerable air-borne diseases would topple the state should

such a pandemic get loose in the prisons.

 

 

Release? Nobody would even discuss it besides Donald Specter who

agreed with me. But it was one brief statement in all the long days of

a trial. Nobody in a position of authority is thinking about release,

only of hiring more doctors and nurses and other medical staff.

 

The core problem of inhumane conditions and severe overcrowding isn't

being addressed. The doctors and nurses surely deserve more

compensation but that is only one small part of the big problem.

 

 

I plan to personally stand out in the wind and rain, whatever the

weather, with a protest sign on Dec 2, 2005 with as many people as I

can call to stand with me and stand up for prisoners who cannot fight

for themselves outside Roderick Hickman's office.

 

He is the man at the top. The buck stops there. I will be at 1515 " S "

Street in Sacramento on Friday Dec 2 from 10 am until I drop because I

am outraged over these preventable deaths of people who did not have a

death sentence. In fact most of them were in prison over a minor crime.

 

 

Nobody should be in a California bloodhouse over a minor crime because

any sentence to them is a potential death sentence in a health care

emergency as great as the one where we find ourselves.

 

 

 

The over-crowding is the 800 lb elephant in the room that nobody wants

to talk about. I am going to talk about it and ask others to join me

in doing so right now before any more prisoners die.

 

 

 

All of this inhumanity, none of it is an actual solution to crime. The

murder of people's family members is taking place in your name with

your tax dollars.

 

Please come and stand with the mothers and other family members whose

loved ones are dead or dying so that we can be viewed as real people.

The animal rights people wouldn't let this treatment happen to a

chicken why are prisoners worth less?

 

 

The prisoners are rioting, committing suicides and hunger striking all

over California because they think no one cares about them and the

retaliation is great if they file a bogus 602 form asking for help.

They cannot fight for themselves so who will stand up for them if not

their families many of whom do not own cars?

 

 

Someone will listen if a large enough crowd shows up at Hickman's

offices. The news media has already alerted the voters that the crisis

is an emergency but it takes so much more to get the remedies in place.

 

 

The flyer for the event is located here. We have a number of

mismanagement issues but medical neglect is the most pressing one.

Every winter most of the whole state goes on vacation and the

prisoners are left to die. We can do something about that, can we not?

 

 

http://www.1union1.com/Dec_2_Rod_Hickman.htm

 

 

United for No Injustice, Oppression or Neglect

www.1union1.com

P.O. Box 340371

Sacramento, Ca. 95834

 

 

 

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I am calling to the families of prisoners to write in response to the

news stories issued within the past few days to the following newspapers

 

letters

 

opinion

 

letters

 

I touched upon some of the reasons the prisoners are dying but

certainly you are the one with the individual case.

 

Suicides caused by intense psychological intimidation, overdoses

caused because guards traffic drugs, prisoners who cut themselves due

to the isolation of the SHU, heat stroke and hot meds complications,

the reasons for their deaths are endless.

 

I did not mention how the men are denied to going to the bathroom for

hours at a time on a routine basis even those who are ill. This makes

me sick each time I witness it realizing that they could have an

accident at any moment that would humiliate them beyond belief.

" Holding it " is very damaging and extremely demoralizing.

 

There are many topics I didn't cover just waiting for you to put

together ten sentences. Don't make it hard, an 8th grader can do it.

 

Pick up your pen, the door is open for you.

 

On Dec 2 pick up a protest sign and help us stand up for prisoners

because we don't know who will be next.

 

 

 

---------------------------

 

 

B. Bird

UNION

P.O. Box 340371

Sacramento Ca. 95834

www.1union1.com/Join_the_UNION.html