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September 18, 2006
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Kimberly Dawn Lundgren |
Michigan prisons hold hundreds of inmates who are chronically or terminally ill, or enfeebled by age, and consequently pose no risk to society. In most cases, releasing them would serve justice. It would also save the state not only the usual costs of incarceration -- $30,000 a year -- but also the expensive medical care that severely sick inmates need. That adds up to millions of dollars.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the Michigan Department of Corrections could help by doing a better job of advancing and approving medical commutations. Legislators could do more by revising a state law to allow the Parole Board to release terminally ill inmates.
MDOC already permits inmates with less than a year to live to apply for medical commutations granted by the governor, but the policy doesn't work well. Prison employees and medical staff don't fully understand the guidelines and procedures. Nor do they routinely advocate for sick inmates seeking a medical release. As a result, many dying inmates are considered too late, or not considered at all.
Making matters worse, some doctors are discouraged from moving on medical commutations. The state Parole Board and Granholm usually deny them, without explanation. The governor gets, on average, 75-100 requests a year for commutations, almost all for medical reasons. In nearly four years in office, she has approved just seven; all of the inmates released have since died.
Granholm appears to lack the courage or compassion to use her legitimate powers of commutation. But even if she had the will, the process for getting a medical commutation is too slow and confusing for people who have only months to live.
Painful, needless delays
Carla Ringleka, 56, of Stanton, died in prison on Aug. 28 of breast cancer, which had spread to her liver and lungs. The Parole Board received an application for Ringleka's commutation in March but didn't recommend against her release until June. In August, Granholm asked the Parole Board to reconsider -- the first time she has made such a request. But she waited two months to act, and by then it was too late. Ringleka died four days later. Five months after her application, Ringleka still had not received a final answer.
Family members and friends say Ringleka did not get treated for breast cancer until nearly a year after she was diagnosed in 2001. Ringleka was serving 20-40 years for second-degree murder. She hired two men in 1999 to kill her husband, Howard Ringleka, who she and her supporters said abused her.
In a similar case advanced by the Michigan Battered Women's Clemency Project, 46-year-old Kimberly Dawn Lundgren, convicted of second-degree murder, died of cancer in prison on Sept. 2. Lundgren, of Allegan, was sentenced to life in prison in 1994 for killing her husband for his $100,000 life insurance policy.
Carol Jacobsen, a University of Michigan professor and director of the Battered Women's Clemency Project, wrote to Granholm in May, advising her of Lundgren's condition. Jacobsen thought a prison medical administrator had submitted a commutation request in July. But Granholm's spokeswoman, Liz Boyd, said the governor never received a request for Lundgren.
"Part of the problem is the obscurity of the process," Jacobsen said.
If obscurity is a problem for a university professor, good luck to the rest of us.
Clear and simple policy directives should cover medical commutations. MDOC should spell out operating procedures in a handbook or brochure for prison medical staff, employees, inmates and families.
For terminally ill inmates, the department ought to require medical staff to give inmates and their families the necessary records and information to support applications for commutations.
Legislators should also give the Parole Board the power to release prisoners with less than a year to live. Truth-in-sentencing laws in 1998 took that authority away, but the Legislature could restore it, and should. A statute giving the Parole Board the authority to approve medical paroles is already on the books.
Get beyond the politics
Taking all medical releases to the governor as commutations is cumbersome and filled with political pitfalls. Most governors are scared stiff to let any inmate out, even on a deathbed. Governors almost always follow Parole Board recommendations anyway, and Michigan's board is one of the nation's toughest.
Shawn Townsend, 35, of Detroit should be home now instead of sitting in a wheelchair, dying at Southern Michigan Correctional Facility in Jackson. Two months ago, doctors gave Townsend, who has testicular cancer, 6-12 months to live. He's finishing a one-year sentence for using another man's ID to buy a 2003 Cadillac Escalade.
Townsend told me that doctors didn't check his testicles during an incoming physical. They apparently did not do the proper tests, either, when his kidneys failed late last year. But Townsend isn't even beefing about that. He just wants to go home and spend a little time with his family before he dies.
Townsend has lost a testicle, most of his hair and at least 70 pounds. He has a tumor in his stomach, a blood clot in his leg and a catheter in his penis. He hasn't had pain medication in nearly two weeks.
I visited his mother, Gale Nyline Townsend, last week on Detroit's east side. She's eager to care for her son, who should have gone home two months ago, when doctors told him he was about to die.
The Parole Board approved his release on Aug. 28. Still, because of truth-in-sentencing laws, he must stay put until next month and serve every day of his sentence.
What sense does that
make?
Last year, 227 inmates died in Michigan prisons, MDOC spokesman Russ Marlan said. More terminally ill inmates should die at home or in a hospice, instead of in prison. It's cheaper for taxpayers, and more humane for inmates and their families. It would set a model of decency that might inspire prisoners to do better.
Getting more dying inmates out would cost nothing -- in fact, it would save money. It would take only a few changes in policy, procedures, law and, perhaps most important, attitude. The Granholm administration and Legislature should muster enough courage, competence and compassion
to do it.
JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
