Last week, former President Bill Clinton admitted his administration’s policies may have caused our nation’s prisons to swell out of control. One of those laws – the Prison Litigation Reform Act – released some inmates, but they left in black body bags, because they had no way to access the courts for relief from substandard correctional medical treatment that may have cost them their lives.
Substandard medical care is so common in prisons, it’s expected. Just this week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at least 15 preventable deaths at Pulaski State Prison occurred under the care of a doctor who had been disciplined for gross negligence and incompetence. Although no one’s counted them together, probably thousands of preventable deaths occur each year in America’s prisons. American taxpayers pay $1.1 billion every year for correctional health care that doesn’t keep many prisoners healthy.
I know firsthand the dangers of correctional health care from serving more than six years in prison. I bled vaginally for two years straight. I pled with the medical unit to do something by filing six separate grievances. During each examination, the doctor attributed the bleeding to stress.
When I was released and saw a gynecologist, she found a cervical polyp she described as the size of a baby’s finger. When I told her I had undergone three pelvic examinations in the previous six months, she informed me sadly: “I find it hard to believe that no one saw this. You should have sued.”
PLRA’s purpose was to prevent inmate litigation, a not-so-ignoble goal given the frivolousness of pending lawsuits about things like the availability of creamy peanut butter at the commissary.
The law limits an inmate’s ability to file claims of substandard medical treatment by imposing an “exhaustion” requirement, forcing her to document how she fought for remedies short of litigation. The exhaustion requirement leaves a prisoner unable to make her case because the prison records department holds this evidence and often”loses” or won’t disclose it. Any lawsuit I would have filed would have been dismissed immediately, because none of my grievances are in my chart.
Furthermore, PLRA forced indigent legal service organizations to stop representing inmates in civil actions if they wished to continue receiving federal funding. If an inmate needs court intervention into a medical problem and cannot afford a lawyer, she has to represent herself — a problem, because so many inmates are under-educated and don’t know how to file papers themselves. With the PLRA preventing legal service organizations from representing inmates, courts remain unaware of what is happening in prison medical units and cannot intervene.
Lives might have been saved if they had been able to order care for inmates from specialists or other sources. But lives were lost, and increasing numbers of preventable deaths and illnesses behind bars indicate correctional medicine needs oversight, possibly from the courts. Former President Clinton might even admit we must repeal the PLRA so legal service organizations can seek relief for sick inmates from the courts and save their lives.
Chandra Bozelko is the author of “Up the River: An Anthology.” She blogs about her prison experiences at www.prison-diaries.com.
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