Inside One Jail's Health Care Problems And ‘Culture Of Impunity’

What happens when guards control access to prisoners’ medical care? Part 3 of the WBUR story Dying on the Sheriff's Watch focuses on the role of guards as gatekeepers to medical care in custody. This quote explains the problem: “Jails and prisons are there to confine and punish,” said Nancy Neveloff Dubler, professor emerita at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an ethics specialist in jail care. “Health care is there to care for and to cure. Those are antithetically opposed goals.”

This WBUR story discusses one of our cases in which a young man named Sam Dunn died after being held in an Essex County Sheriff’s van for hours. He was experiencing a medical emergency—an overdose that could have been prevented with proper medical care—but the officers in the van never checked on him until it was too late. As Sam’s father says, “They just basically ignored him to death.”

It is not uncommon for guards and medical staff in jails to ignore sick people. In another one of our cases, staff claimed our client was faking her undetectable pulse and blood pressure. By the time a doctor examined her, she was dead.

When COVID-19 spreads in our nation's jails and prisons the health care system will not be able to handle the cases. This is the Week of Action to demand release of incarcerated people. Today’s action is to call, email, and tweet the Governor and tell him to use his Clemency powers to release all people who are older than 50 and people who are medically vulnerable, and order the parole board to grant parole for all eligible people. Tell the Governor that people released from incarceration need housing and healthcare, and to make emergency funding available to support people’s transition back into the community. For more info on the Week of Action and why this action is necessary, follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/maweekofaction.