ThePopTort

Incarceration Tensions

Two incarceration stories have lots of people on edge today.  First comes breaking news that the two U.S. hikers - Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer – who have been locked up in Tehran’s Evin prison, have finally been released.  At the same time, everyone from “a former FBI director, former President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI” to European lawmakers are urging that the execution of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis be stopped, since he’s likely innocent.  He's set to die tonight.

So in terms of incarceration news items, the following story may get a little buried. 

You may not know this, but we have been privatizing our prison systems for years now.  When prisons are privatized, they are run for a profit. You can imagine the results.  Actually, no imagination is needed. 

One of the biggest players in prison privatization biz is the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), an innocuous-sounding company which describes itself as “the nation’s leading provider of correctional solutions to federal, state and local government” and which boasts of, among other things, “rehabilitating inmates, giving back to communities, and bringing innovative security to government corrections – all while consistently saving hardworking taxpayers’ dollars.” 

CCA just settled a lawsuit brought on behalf of inmates at one of CCA’s Idaho prisons, the notorious Idaho Correctional Center.  Apparently, this prison,

[W]as so violent it was dubbed “Gladiator School,” and that guards used inmate-on-inmate violence as a management tool and then denied prisoners medical care as a way to cover up the assaults.  … “The unnecessary carnage and suffering that has resulted is shameful and inexcusable,” the ACLU wrote in the lawsuit. “ICC not only condones prisoner violence, the entrenched culture of ICC promotes, facilitates, and encourages it.”

CCA denies this, but that denial only goes so far since “the agreement is governed under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which only applies in cases in which prisoners' Constitutional rights have been violated.”  CCA has agreed to do better, make improvements and face more litigation if they don’t.  If that happens, maybe CCA should consider relocating.  I’m sure the Iranian prison system could use their expertise.

UPDATE: Troy Davis, RIP.

A Pinch of Accutane, A Sprinkling of Police Misconduct…

There’s a lot happening in the world of civil justice these days—a veritable tossed salad of relevant news items (which is not to say reading today’s blog will be like being forced to eat your vegetables!)  Here’s a taste: 

More Pain from Accutane:  Center for Justice & Democracy has written about Accutane in its recent study on women and unsafe drugs, but in New Jersey, a “jury has ordered drugmaker Roche to pay nearly $13 million to three patients who claim they developed a chronic bowel disorder because of the company's acne drug Accutane.”

Hospital Hazard: Tabitha Mullings walked into a Brooklyn emergency room “suffering from what she thought was just a kidney stone, but a medical nightmare left her partly blind and a quadruple amputee.”  Reportedly, doctors “failed to diagnose an infection that has literally eaten her alive.”

Prison Outbreaks: “Guards took the stand Thursday in the landmark trial over crowding inside California's prisons and described numerous examples of negligent health care, including inmates using communal showers with open wounds and suicidal prisoners kept for hours inside cages the size of telephone booths.”  Prison guard Gary Benson testified that he “routinely sees inmates in communal showers with "bleeding, oozing" staph infections, and that he “contracted an antibiotic-resistant staph infection in July 2006,” as a result of his exposure.

Cruel and Unusual Birth:  A former inmate of the Pocatello (ID) Women's Correctional Center is suing for allegedly being “denied proper health care” which resulted in her “giving birth on a concrete ramp after being left in a holding room for 10 hours.”  The suit also alleges that “the birth occurred while she was being moved in a wheelchair, and that her son, Taylor, ‘fell from her body and the wheelchair, landing on the back of his head on the concrete ramp.’"

LA Cops Not Above the Law:  The city of Los Angeles has agreed to “pay nearly $13 million to immigration protesters and bystanders injured by Los Angeles police officers during a melee at MacArthur Park last year.”  Reportedly, many protesters and bystanders “ranging from children to senior citizens” filed lawsuits, alleging that “LAPD's elite Metro Division used batons and fired rubber bullets into the largely peaceful crowd,” and that “hundreds of demonstrators and journalists and 18 officers suffered injuries,” including one woman who suffered a miscarriage.