After I was indicted, I spent three years on pretrial walking among the free but knowing my fate was coming soon. I was blessed with a good friend that turned into my life coach. This friend had been through the federal system many years before and had made it through and done rather well in life. I decided this was the one I would seek advice from, and I needed a lot of it. I had never been in trouble and here I was headed to the feds. I was terrified of the unknown and I could always count on my friend to talk me off the ledge and bring some order to the crazy train my brain kept trying to jump on.
While coaxing me off the ledge he would often offer advice of things that had never occurred to me. One of the biggest points he drove home was once you go into incarceration you have no rights. He made it clear that no matter how hard I stomped my feet or how loud I yelled, it would never matter, because just like the feds, the prison system held all the cards and I would be at their mercy for as long as I was in custody. He would provide example after example of stories of his experiences. Some were entertaining, and some were heartbreaking. He made it perfectly clear that no matter what injustice had happened, there was no chance in fighting because you would never prevail in a battle with your captors. He told me just to put my head down and do my time and mind my own business.
A cardinal rule he told me countless times was never to get hurt or sick while incarcerated because there is no medical care and make sure all my dental needs were taken care of before it was time to go. I honestly thought he was exaggerating about some of the things he told me. I really struggled to believe that in the United States of America we had a prison system that allowed so much suffering. Turns out, he was right about everything and there was not even a tiny drop of exaggeration. My year in federal holding provided more than enough examples of why things must change and why prisons need reform from the ground up, but this piece focuses on the medical aspect. We desperately need change and prison reform needs to be in the spotlight.
Before 1996, inmates could bring litigation to the courts and seek relief, justice, resolution, and often bring successful improvements to prisons. The justice system has always been the vehicle to bring change and fight for what is right in this country. Then the Prison Litigation Reform Act went into effect in 1996. The idea was to help rid the courts of petty complaints brought by inmates.
By making things easier for the court, it dropped a veil of secrecy over the entire prison system and eliminated millions of inmates from having equal access to the courts. This act requires an inmate seeking relief from unhealthy or dangerous conditions, to first exhaust their “remedies” with the institution in which they are detained. What this means is the inmate must go to their captors for help and go through an obstacle course of paperwork before going to court is even a possibility. Many inmates fear retaliation, many don’t know how to navigate the remedy process or get so frustrated they give up, and then there are those that cannot read and write and really don’t have a way to even get started. No matter your level of education or understanding of the law, the remedy process does nothing but render you helpless.
The inmates that are not detoured by the possibility of retaliation must move forward swiftly and be extremely diligent in making their moves and following the order of the process to a T. One small mess up or missed deadline and the issue becomes dead in the water with no chance of resurrection. While some of these discrepancies may be petty, others are quite profound and unfortunately will remain in the dark only to be told as cautionary tales among inmates and never brought to light for any kind of resolution. It is basically like telling a child who is under complete control of their parent to take up their issues of abuse with the parent abusing them, before seeking outside help. You see how that is a problem, right?
This leads me to my next point. In this country there are a lot of children in the prison system and many are missing their education by being incarcerated. These kids are often abused and suffer greatly at the hands of their captors and the PLRA applies to them as well. Remedies are confusing for anyone, but I am sure are extremely difficult for a child to get any kind of relief.
Through my incarceration I have watched people fight for different injustices and claw their way through the labyrinth of remedies and finally make out with their issue to proceed to the court just before they are released. The PLRA tilts the playing field and stacks the deck against the inmate. Without transparency and someone to answer to, there is a lot of room for error. The PLRA was a major game changer that allowed the prison system to operate out of sight and out of mind from the public.
My year in federal holding was enough for me to realize the federal system is fundamentally flawed and the PLRA sure does not help matters. While the feds continue to flood the federal holding facilities, the lack of care continues to diminish. People with basic needs are completely ignored and often mocked and laughed at when they seek help from their captors through this remedy process.
When I was at CCA in federal holding, we had one hour outside at rec every day. One day I went out and was playing sand volleyball with some other ladies. I jumped to spike a ball and came down wrong. I heard an eerie popping noise and dropped all the way to the ground. My knee could not support me, something had snapped. I swear my life flashed before my eyes. I was terrified and I had broken that one cardinal rule… I was hurt, now what?
I had seen medical swoop in for other medical emergencies like seizures but most of the time people just suffered and the guards refused to call medical. I guess being flopped down in the sand unable to move with, I am sure, a frantic look on my face, was enough to warrant calling medical. They swooped in to whisk me away to medical. There were I think 5 people that came to my rescue and scooped me off the playground plopping me into a wheelchair and promptly headed to medical.
That initial act gave me a false sense of security and I remember thinking well maybe this is not going to be so bad. I got to medical and they all stood around talking to each other and I cannot say I really remember them talking to me. It was like I didn’t exist. One took my blood pressure and told me it was high and then she handed me a pair of crutches and told me the guard would take me back. Oh… so you guys only make it look good where the cameras are and then when the curtains close it’s real clear, it was only an act. They refused to x-ray me, there was no examination, they did not even try to see my knee. I had long pants on, and my knee was already swollen enough not to be able to pull them up, but it did not matter because they did not have any interest in even seeing my knee. I learned prayer was my only hope.
I lived on the second floor in my unit, so when I got back after the longest trip of my life on crutches, I stood there staring at the stairs I was going to have to climb. Then I promptly gave up and sat down and scooted up one step at a time and finally made it to my room just in time for count. I knew this was not going to work and the guards had me move downstairs. After my demonstration of my inability to use crutches, I am pretty sure I was a huge liability to have anywhere near the stairs.
Dr. Jesus healed my knee rather quickly and I felt pretty blessed for it. I was never x rayed, they never even looked at my knee, and not once did any medical staff check back to see what was going on. I made a mental note to stay healthy and not break anything.
I was as careful as I could be with my body for the rest of my stay. But it was not just medical that was so uncaring, I watched as some people got one tooth pulled after another until they had none left. There was no such thing as fillings, just pull the tooth. People that are put on antidepressants had some rough days too. They would prescribe it to anyone who asked and max out their dose in a hurry. After they had been on it for a while, the druggy buggy that came for pill line twice a day would mysteriously just run out of the medicine for days and these people depending on these meds were cut off cold turkey. It was like watching a fresh addict come off the streets and go through withdrawal, and there were plenty of them as well.
This country uses the prison system for the cruelest version of a rehab. Basically, the inmates are thrown in a cell and are at the mercy of the inmates to take care of them and make sure they do not drown in their own vomit.
When people are coming off drugs there will probably be some puke involved and all we had to use to clean was bare hands and watered-down chemicals. It was terrible to watch these people go through this without a drop of compassion from the medical staff. The seizure patients were extremely hard for me to watch. I had never seen someone have a seizure before my eyes until I came into federal holding. For some reason, the fire alarms went off all the time in this place and everyone with a seizure problem would hit the deck either bracing themselves for the inevitable or in a full-on seizure. Many would not be able to control their bladder and again, an inmate would have to clean with no gloves or proper chemicals. Then the inmates would have to get the person in the showers and clean them up as well because after a seizure the person cannot stand on their own.
My year in federal holding was heartbreaking to witness so much suffering by people that are just being held without a conviction. Federal holdings detain people charged with a federal crime and are either waiting for their plea or waiting for sentencing. Some people are there on just a criminal complaint and have not even been charged yet. So much for innocent until proven guilty.
It took over a year for me to be sentenced and in Missouri if you have a drug crime you must turn yourself in at the time you take your plea. Around the time I was sentenced I witnessed the worst example of a medical injustice happen just before my eyes. One of the sweetest ladies I have ever met was not given pretrial and had been sitting at CCA much longer than I and was just waiting for her plea. She was nonviolent, a first time offender, and was charged with drug conspiracy, but was not directly involved and there was no physical evidence to hold her, just ghost dope (statements by drug addicts and unsavory characters). This lady had been a nurse for many years and was married to a man that got involved with heroin. Like so many people, he had an injury and was overcome with pain. He was cut off from his pain pills and found heroin as a chance to relieve his discomfort and buying a little heroin turned into much more. Although she was not directly involved, the feds wrapped her into the conspiracy and there she sat.
She was one that always helped everyone else and was like the grandma of the pod. I cannot recall her ever complaining about anything, but one day she started mentioning her discomfort. She did not feel right and started trying to get medical attention to look at her. They would not help her and paid no attention to her cries for help. Days went by and she couldn’t go to the bathroom. This tiny woman went from size small in pants to an extra-large just to get them over her horribly distended stomach in a matter of days.
She was visibly deteriorating before my eyes. When a nurse would come for one of the daily pill lines, I would escort her over to them, as she could no longer walk on her own and was doubled over in pain, but they refused to come to her. One day a nurse yelled at her and called her lazy and continued to berate her for not promptly obeying her commands and getting to the door quick enough. It was horrible and I felt so bad for her. When it was over, I took her back to her cell. I quickly went to mine and cried my eyes out for her. I remember another nurse telling her that if she didn’t want to help herself then why should she bother to help her and laughing telling her to go ahead and write her up, that her job couldn’t be more secure.
I think it was the next day that my friend was taken out in an ambulance after 12 days of not being able to use the bathroom and her stomach blowing up like a balloon. She was gone for weeks. It turned out she had stage 4 colon cancer and the reason she could not go to the bathroom was because the tumor had gotten so large that nothing could pass through her bowels. I was taken to prison before she came back. I heard she died a few months later.
In conclusion, when you hear “prison reform” what do you think? Do you visualize scary criminal looking people filling the streets like a zombie apocalypse? I want to encourage people to not be limited by perception and mindsets that place all prisoners in a negative light. There are so many people that are serving sentences that just do not make sense and there are so many that suffer due to lack of medical care. These stories I have shared are unfortunately not uncommon. People around here can sit and trade horror stories of their journey through incarceration all day. It is not a miracle we need for prison reform, its awareness. The overcrowding of prisons is not going to just go away. Peaceful people will continue to be needlessly packed into these institutions on top of one another with very little care available to them. This is no place for an addict to be reformed. This broken thing I find myself amid needs so much change from the ground up
