by Dale Chappell
Need help paying for college while in prison? Getting financial aid in prison for college got easier on December 20, 2020. That’s when Congress passed a $1.4 trillion government spending bill for 2021 that included a provision to lift a 26-year-old ban on giving prisoners federal financial ...
by Dale Chappell
When historic wildfires burned through Arizona in June 2020, two out of three of the firefighters who brought the blazes under control were state prisoners who were paid just pennies on the dollar to do the same job as well-paid professional firefighters working right next to them. ...
by Dale Chappell
Apparently, it’s easier to release someone from jail and dismiss the charges if their issues become too much trouble, according to a lawsuit filed by James Bagley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Bagley was arrested in September 2017 for suspected driving ...
by Dale Chappell
Former prisoners who have turned to the nonprofit organization The Doe Fund in New York City for work and job training have found themselves making less than minimum wage, once the Doe Fund takes its fees out of their paychecks. Some say this is exploitation of those ...
by Dale Chappell
A whistleblower at a privately operated federal detention center in Georgia prompted a joint complaint filed in September 2020 with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging inadequate and even suspicious medical care for the immigrants being held there.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) added her voice to the chorus calling for OIG to thoroughly investigate the allegations of the whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, a full-time nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Ocilla, Georgia.
In the main part of her statement, Wooten alleged that medical staff at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility had responded maliciously to the coronavirus pandemic, refusing to test or treat immigrants showing signs of COVID-19, ignoring and shredding medical request forms and even falsifying medical records.
But she also made another startling allegation: Hysterectomies were performed on several female detainees without their informed consent. She said she and other employees were concerned that an outside doctor contracted by the facility “takes everybody’s stuff out.”
“That’s his specialty,” she said, referring to the doctor, an obstetrician and gynecologist later identified as Dr. Mahendra Amin. “He’s the uterus collector.”
If detainees complained, ...
by Dale Chappell
While the coronavirus runs rampant through the country’s prisons, medical treatment for even serious problems has taken a backseat, leaving prisoners to get creative and perform their own treatment. For one New Jersey prisoner, this meant cleaning his infected wound with bleach, his family says, making them concerned for his health.
The problem started with just a small scrape on his foot, probably caused by ill-fitting boots the prison forced him to wear, Patch.com reported on June 4, 2020. Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem for most people, but for this 36-year-old man housed at the Northern State Prison in Newark, a small cut on his foot could easily turn into a life-threatening dilemma: He’s a diabetic, and any wound to his feet puts him at risk for infection that could lead to amputation.
Soon, an ugly, open wound broke out and an infection went all the way to his knee. The prison gave him some antibiotic ointment and ibuprofen for pain, plus some oral antibiotics. This didn’t work, and he developed cellulitis and borderline septicemia, a systemic and life-threatening infection that is difficult to treat even in the hospital with IV antibiotics.
Finally, he was transferred ...
by Dale Chappell
On March 20, 2020, Alaska’s Supreme Court shut down a state prisoner’s argument that his diagnosis as a schizophrenic was incorrect because he claims he can actually see ghosts due to a genetic mutation.
Adam Israel had been in custody of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) since 2005 for the stabbing death of his mother. Based on a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia – he claimed that family members, possibly including comedian Steve Martin, had conspired to keep him in state custody to prevent him from testifying to rapes and murders they had committed – he was held in a mental institution.
In October 2014, he filed a pro se medical malpractice lawsuit, claiming that he was “fraudulently diagnosed” as schizophrenic, and that this had prevented him from release on parole and other rehabilitative progress. He said the delusions he suffers are actually real, claiming that he could see electro-magnetic fields emitted from “poltergeists” because of a genetic mutation resulting from family inbreeding.
Israel asked the court to allow him to demonstrate, but Superior Court Judge Frank Pfiffner called his testimony “bizarre and, at least from a lay perspective, consistent with that of someone suffering from paranoid ...
by Dale Chappell
Suicides in California prisons reached a record high last year, with 38 recorded. According to prison and union officials, a lack of psychiatrists and other problems in the state’s prison system contributed to the high number.
Despite an offer of a $300,000 annual salary plus government benefits, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has yet to convince psychiatrists to fill the vacancies in the prison system. About 40 percent of the state’s psychiatry jobs are empty, including those at the state’s prison and mental health institutions, according to data from 2018, the last year the numbers were available from CDCR
Elizabeth Gransee, a spokesperson for California Correctional Healthcare Services, said the vacancy rate is 28 percent if accounting for contract psychiatrists, including those who treat via telepsychiatry video conferencing. “We are continuously improving recruitment of health care staff including mental health care providers,” she responded in an email to the Sacramento Bee. “[CDCR] continues to make substantial improvements in the delivery of health care and we will continue to ensure our population has access to the care they need.”
Dr. Stuart Bussey disagrees. He is the president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, and says that in addition to ...
by Dale Chappell
Almost 60 percent of COVID-19 cases in Chicago were linked to police throwing people in the Cook County Jail and then releasing them to their home communities, according to a Harvard University study published in June 2020. Researchers found that “jail cycling” accounted for over one-third of coronavirus cases in Illinois.
The study examined the relationship between jail cycling and community infections across different neighborhoods in the state of Illinois, one of the nation’s largest jails. That data showed that as of April 19, 2020, almost 1 in 6 coronavirus cases in the state were linked to people who cycled through the Cook County Jail in Chicago in March.
Jail cycling happens when people are arrested for minor infractions and put in jail for a short time and then released. According to studies, about 95 percent of people booked into jails across the country were arrested for non-violent crimes, and 42 percent were proven innocent. The numbers add up fast. According to the FBI, about 28,000 people are arrested every single day in this country. That means over 10 million people are arrested and cycled through a county jail every year in the U.S.
Jail cycling has ...
by Dale Chappell
It used to be that specially trained prisoners who worked on the front lines fighting wildfires couldn’t continue to work as firefighters after their release. Thanks to a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on September 11, 2020, some prisoner-firefighters may find it’s possible to stay on the job.
The new law (designated as AB 2147) allows releasees to petition the court to dismiss their convictions after completing their sentences, which would then allow them to obtain certification as an emergency medical technician (EMT), something most fire departments require to get in the door. It’s not that prisoner-firefighters couldn’t be firefighters after release, but that they couldn’t get the additional certifications to obtain actual employment after release. The state categorically barred anyone with a felony conviction from obtaining an EMT certification. Now that obstacle has been removed for some.
“Inmates who have stood on the frontlines, battling historic fires should not be denied the right to later become a professional firefighter,” Newsom said as he signed the bill into law.
Assembly member Eloise Gómez Reyes, who sponsored the bill, said the new law has a broader purpose. “Rehabilitation without strategies to ensure the formerly incarcerated have ...
