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November 14, 2006
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In the end, it took a federal judge to get it right. Michigan's state bureaucracy, against all available evidence, has been in denial about Michigan's deadly and dysfunctional prison health care system. Even Gov. Jennifer Granholm's pledge in August to order an outside review of health care in Michigan's nearly 50 prisons is beginning to smell like an election-year ploy. The review was supposed to start in early October but the state hasn't even decided who is going to do it.
The strong wording in the preliminary injunction he issued Monday shows that U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen of Kalamzoo had clearly run out of patience with the state. He told the Department of Corrections and its private contractor for primary services, Correctional Medical Services of Missouri, to either treat sick inmates or be held in contempt of court and jailed.
"You are valuable providers of life-saving services and medicines," Enslen wrote. "You are not coat racks who collect government paychecks while your work is taken to the sexton for burial. The days of dead wood in the Department of Corrections are over, as are the days of CMS intentionally delaying referrals and care for craven profit motives."
Among other things, he ordered the department to end the punitive, non-medical use of restraints at Jackson prison facilities and develop a plan, within 45 days, to adequately staff care for the mentally ill and coordinate care between medical and mental health staff. Last month, Corrections voluntarily eased prison restraint policies but should go even further now and ban four-point strap-downs at state prisons.
Enslen's injunction recognizes that the medical and mental health care in Michigan prisons does not meet constitutional standards and makes clear to the state that a federal judge is watching.
The ruling comes after a series of columns and editorials I wrote examining the worsening state of health care in Michigan prisons. Medical and mental health cares in prisons costs taxpayers $280 million a year, but misdiagnoses, delayed treatment and other problems in some cases turn prison stays into death sentences.
In one case cited by Enslen, 21-year-old Timothy Joe Souders, who was mentally ill, died on Aug. 6 after spending most of his last four days strapped to a steel table in oppressive heat. In another case, 41-year-old Lloyd Byron Martell was sent home to die this summer after I detailed the way a cancerous polyp went untreated.
Unfortunately, improvements will come only through outside pressure, whether that comes from multi-million lawsuits or more federal oversight -- the kind Enslen exercised Monday.
The state must cooperate fully with the federal injunction and stop half-stepping on the independent review. Legislators must get more involved with shaping this review. Their hands-off policy on this problem is largely responsible for the increasing intervention of the federal courts.
Finally, prison health care must get the attention of Corrections Director Patricia Caruso, who up to now has expressed almost complete confidence in the system. That attitude flies in the face of much of the available evidence -- not just the cases I've written about but in hundreds of pages of documents filed in federal court. This isn't a new problem. Corrections has been under a federal consent decree in a case called Hadix since 1985 to improve medical care and other conditions at state prisons in Jackson.
Up to now, our elected officials have not had the courage, common sense or compassion to act. Enslen has. Now the state needs to take his order and apply it to all its prisons and make sure no one else dies from state-imposed torture.
JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
