Should All Inmates Have the Right to Be Treated Fairly?

Imagine . . . It is 10:00 PM on a Friday night. You walk into a liquor store to get a night cap when a man in a ski mask barges in with a gun. The man points the gun at the clerk behind the counter demanding that he give him all the money in the cash register. The store clerk tries to fight back and gets shot. The robber jumps behind the counter and empties the cash register, and then he decides to rob everyone in the store as well. While he is gathering wallets and purses from the patrons in the liquor store, the police show up and arrest the man.

After the robber is handcuffed and placed in the police cruiser, the policemen start to take statements from everyone that was in the store at the time. They get to a middle aged man and ask him his name. Upon running his name through the system they find out that this man has a warrant for his arrest for non-payment of child support. Both men are taken to jail. Should they both be treated equally as criminals? Does one or the other, both, or neither, have the right to be treated fairly?

What about if you find out extenuating circumstances that have made it impossible for the second man to find a job and provide support for his children? What if he is disabled and unable to work? In my opinion, there are some criminals who do not deserve fair treatment, but how do we decide what is fair and who is worthy? 

I had some great sources of information for this topic. A friend of mine is a retired supervisor from the Jackson prison. His name has been changed by his request. Alex worked in the Jackson prison for seven years and later moved south where he worked as a supervisor for 12 more years, retiring in the late 90’s after an injury. Alex told me about a few different ways that inmates and/or prisoners might be treated unethically. Some being: withholding of medication, withholding of food, and violence towards inmates. “The unspoken assumption is that prisoners are not persons. Or at best, they are a different kind of person: so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies” (as cited in Sweeney, 2010).

I chose this topic for many reasons, the strongest being because there was a very recent incident involving my daughter’s father’s death in a county jail. Stephen Stiles was booked into the Kent County Jail at “4:38 A.M. on three counts of not paying child support” (WOODTV8, 2011), (none of the counts were pursued by me). This was on Tuesday, May 31, 2011; Steve was found dead in his cell around 8:30 P.M. on the same day (Gmiter, 2011). Steve had a medical condition and was unable to work because of seizures. He was in and out of the hospital and had prescription medicine to help reduce the seizures. Even though he was considered disabled, he was repeatedly denied benefits and social security.

Steve was unable to work, and unable to get help from the state, therefore, he had no money to pay child support. He was well over $100,000 behind on child support and had been to jail at least once a year for non-payment for the last five or six years (since the seizures started and he was fired for liability reasons). When Steve was booked in early Tuesday morning, he had his prescription in his pocket and he told the guards and nurse that he needed this medication for his seizures. He called his sister at 6:00 A.M. and again at 2:00 P.M. outraged that he was not getting his medicine. In a recorded phone conversation between Steve and his sister, Steve said “I am going to die in here and then they are going to figure out why I need those damn pills.” After this call to his sister, he returned to his cell and never left again. They checked in another inmate and placed him in the same cell around 6:00 P.M. who said Steve was lying on his bunk facing the wall, and he never seen him move. Around 8:00 P.M. Steve was finally called to receive his medication. After they noticed that he was not coming to get his medicine, they went to look for him and found him “unresponsive” (Gmiter, 2011). Steve had died around 4:00 P.M., less than 12 hours after being taken into custody, and laid there dead for four and one half hours.

This death was easily preventable. Now the ones that suffer are his daughters. The system needs to have a better way of making sure inmates have the medications that they need to remain alive. My husband has noted that if you have a medical concern while incarcerated, it could take up to two days to talk to a nurse about it.

Although, not everyone is in such an innocent position when they are incarcerated. What about the scenario at the beginning of this article? Would I feel so angry at the jail if it was the armed robber that had died instead? How do we differentiate the diverse types of criminals? Can they be in the same place and be treated differently? Would you treat a man who cheated on his taxes as harshly as a man who killed a child? Would you act differently toward a man who ran a stop sign accidently killing his wife in the passenger seat, and a man who deliberately shot and killed his wife?

What about withholding food from inmates? Could it be ethical to refuse to give an inmate food just because you do not like them or you are mad at them for some reason? Alex, the retired prison supervisor, said this happened quite often. Alex said that some of the guards were racist and would withhold food from certain inmates just because of their skin color. From his account most of the times that food or medication was withheld was because they were racist against African Americans.

Alex also mentioned that there was unnecessary violence towards the prisoners. He stated that in the “block” where he supervised, all inmates were housed in separate cells. Each cell had a door with a small hole to pass things through. In order to open the door, at any time, the inmates were required to be handcuffed. Alex said that occasionally the guards would open the door, without restraining the inmate in handcuffs first, then enter the cell and “pound the piss out of them”; he said that this might be done because the inmate had something contraband that they refused to give up.

My husband, Jeff, was incarcerated late in 2010 at the Kent County Correctional Facility in the Work Release program. One day after being released to go to work he had taken some cough medicine from a gas station. When he returned to the Work Release building, they smelled the cough syrup and gave him a breathalyzer. He had blown a 0.0007, but (as we later found out) the guard had written the number down wrong on the report as a 0.07. The guards immediately assumed that he had been drinking before returning to the jail and sent him over to solitary confinement for fourteen days. After a few days of solitude, he had pushed the emergency button, located inside the confinement cells, to ask the guard when he could take a shower. Jeff says “The guard was so pissed that I had pushed the button just to ask when I could take a shower so he would not let me out of the cell at all until five days later when they finally let me take a shower.” For fourteen days Jeff sat in solitary confinement in the same dirty clothes; even when he was allowed to shower, over a week after being placed in the cell, he had to put on the same clothes.

Jeff also recalls that one day he had asked a guard a “stupid question”, he does not remember exactly what, but the guard got mad that he was talking to him when he did not need to be. The next morning the same guard delivered Jeff’s breakfast through a slit in the door. The guard put the breakfast in the cell and then banged on the door yelling “breakfast time”. Jeff states “I woke up and seen my tray but as I got up to go get it, the guard took it back out and said I should have gotten up faster if I wanted my breakfast.” He also recounts that the day after that, the same guard delivered breakfast to him, but he took his spoon away when he put the tray through the door. The Human Resource manager in the work release building stated that it was a mistake that he was taken out of Work Release and never should have been put in solitary confinement in the first place.

What about performing medical tests on prisoners? Is this in any way ethical? It has recently been brought to light that even here in America there have been medical studies carried out using prisoners as lab rats. In an article by Brian Bujdos (2011) he states:

The medical community, and the public in general, seemed to agree that sacrifices for the nation was more important than the human rights of those who were felt to not either contribute to society or have ‘full rights’ as Americans.

I do not know a single person who would disagree that the studies that Hitler performed on the Jews were completely wrong and unethical. So why would we do something similar here in America?

            During the 1930-1960’s there were a variety of different medical studies done on inmates and mentally ill people. In the 1930’s through the 1940’s it was more of an observational medical analysis. In an article found in JSTOR it was noted that “Investigators planned to follow the disease process in men who had acquired [syphilis] ‘naturally’ and who, it was assumed, would not receive treatment for it” (Baader, Lederer, Low, Schmaltz, & Schwerin, 2005, p.225). This surveillance of 400 “Negro males” observed the process of the sexually transmitted disease without doing anything to prevent or cure the illness. These studies were made possible because President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized these studies through the Office of Scientific Research Development (OSRD). “The human subjects [were] . . . primarily ‘subjects of convenience’. . . the OSRD participants included children in orphanages, inmates of mental asylums, soldiers, conscientious objectors, and prisoners” (Baader, Ledereer, Low, Schmaltz, & Schwerin, 2005).

            In the 1940’s through the 1960’s they took the medical experiments up a notch. They started infecting people with illnesses to see how they would react. Brian Bujdos reports:

One study involved injecting mentally ill men with hepatitis, and another required young male prisoners to swallow unfiltered stool suspension. One study subjected 23 inmates to the Asian flu. In yet another study, which involved two dozen inmate volunteers, gonorrhea was pumped into their system directly through the penis. (2011)

These are atrocious and extremely unethical accounts of mistreatment of inmates and because they were done in the 1930’s through the 1960’s one would assume that this is well in the past, but it is not. Studies may not be as prominent in the States, but “it is hard to tell if [they really have dissipated] due to the fact that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008” (Bujdos, 2011). It is still such a great concern that “President Barack Obama charged a bioethics panel to re-evaluate the means by which international studies are conducted and tracked” (Bujdos, 2011).

            As you can see by overwhelming accounts from articles, journals, a retired prison supervisor, and ex-inmates, there are many instances where prisoners and/or inmates are treated unfairly and unethically. Although they are criminals, they are still people and deserve to be treated as such. The justice department needs to take a good hard look at how their system works, and there are a lot of changes that need to be made. Some of the people that are incarcerated are just like you and me who happen to have made a bad choice and got caught. I can attest for myself, just like most other people on earth, that I have done things that could have put me behind bars even though I am not a terrible person. If I was in that situation, I would want to be treated fairly and not have all my rights as an American taken away.

 

References

Baader, G., Lederer, S. E., Low, M., Schmaltz, F., & Schwerin, A.V. (2005). Pathways to Human Experinemtation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States. The History of Science Society, 20, 205-231. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655257.

Bujdos, B. (2011, February 28). Atrocious Medical Tests Performed on Prisoners and Disabled from 1940-1960. Retrieved from http://www.accessrx.com/blog/current-health-news/medical-test-prisoner-disabled-obama-b0228.

Gmiter, T. (2011, June 01). Inmate found dead in the Kent County Jail. Retrieved from http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/06/inmate_found_dead_in_the_kent.html.

Sweeney, M. (2010, August 5). Legal Brutality: Prisons and Punishment, the American Way. American Literary History, 22(3), 698-713. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v022/22.3sweeney.pdf

WOODTV8. (2011, June 1). Inmate found dead in Kent Co. jail cell. Retrieved from http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/grand_rapids/Inmate-found-dead-in-Kent-Co.-jail-cell.