Prison Healthcare

Prisoners feel like they are ‘sitting ducks,’ said a woman whose boyfriend is incarcerated at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center.

Prisoners say the jail, which has seen more than 800 confirmed cases, is a ‘death trap’ plagued by sanitary issues and a lack of testing. Their testimonies stand at stark odds with the sheriff’s office, which says it is keeping ‘staff and detainees as safe as possible.’

Medical ethics experts have criticized the state’s prison officials and say masks to protect against COVID-19 should be distributed ‘with no strings attached.’

Governor John Bel Edwards has yet to commute Gloria Williams’s sentence despite a parole board’s unanimous recommendation that she be freed. Now she is in critical condition at a Baton Rouge hospital.

‘This is getting worse,’ one woman said. ‘People just want to sleep or fight. They play with our emotions constantly. This place is scary.’

Governor Mike DeWine, critics say, ‘is risking turning low-level prison sentences into death sentences.’

‘We are still packed in like sardines,’ writes Fate Winslow, who’s serving a life sentence. ‘The prison doesn’t supply anything for us.’

It took a prisoner’s death ‘just for them to pass out a single extra bar of soap,’ one incarcerated man said.

Incarcerated people, corrections officers, and their families and communities are bound together by the threat of a deadly and fast-moving disease. The sooner we recognize this, and take decisive action, the more lives we will save.

‘Continuing to maintain these youths in this hotbed of contagion poses an unconscionable and entirely preventable risk of harm,’ one lawsuit states.

“They are treating it like any epidemic in prison—that is to isolate, treat and then release back to the population.”

A man with multiple medical conditions incarcerated on a technical violation urgently needs to be released, his attorney says.

In a joint statement, they emphasized the need to reduce the number of people currently incarcerated in order to contain the deadly COVID-19 virus.

To prevent more people from being infected with COVID-19, defense attorneys are calling for courts to release people.

Public health recommendations aren’t easy to follow for the incarcerated, unhoused, or the thousands who’ve been subjected to water shutoffs in recent years.

With Taylor Elizabeth Eldridge, a Type Investigations Ida B. Wells Fellow and Appeal contributor.

The suit is the latest of at least three complaints filed against the Portage County Jail this year.

With Appeal contributor Zachary Siegel, a journalism fellow at Northeastern University Law School’s Health in Justice Action Lab, and Lev Facher of STAT News.

The poor healthcare that Bobbie Jean Johnson received during her more than 40 years in prison contributed to her death, family members say.

Even after a major class action suit required Illinois to revamp its prison healthcare system, doctors whose alleged neglect resulted in major injury or death still remain on the prison system payroll.

The company recently lost its contract with Arizona after allegations of serious—and sometimes fatal—medical neglect that have echoes across the country.

With Mercedes Montagnes of the Promise of Justice Initiative.

Trial begins in class action suit alleging medical neglect by Louisiana State Penitentiary.