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November 20, 2006
Gov. Jennifer Granholm can improve Michigan's deadly and dysfunctional prison medical and mental health care system by simply refusing to appeal a reasonable order by U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen. The public, which shells out $280 million a year for an incompetent and unaccountable system, deserves better than to have more money spent trying to delay necessary fixes, as the Department of Corrections is recommending.
If anything, Enslen's order to stop the use of nonmedical, punitive restraints and improve staffing and care didn't go far enough, because it applies only to those prisons in Jackson that are under a federal consent decree.
Still, it's a good first step that would give the administration a chance to end its foot-dragging and denial, even after the Aug. 6 death of Timothy Joe Souders, a 21-year-old mentally ill inmate who spent most of his last four days naked, strapped down and soaked in his own urine. An independent medical monitor has likened Michigan's prison restraint policies to torture.
Corrections officials say their restraint practices are standard for prison systems nationwide, but that's not necessarily true. At issue is not whether four-point restraints are permitted, but under what conditions they occur. Enslen's order allowing them for medical reasons, by order of a physician, is sound. If his order had been in effect four months ago, it would have saved Souders' life.
An autopsy report lists Souders' cause of death as hyperthermia, or overheating, and complications -- a totally preventible condition. Calling Enslen's order an overreaction to one case, as one prison official did, is callous and misguided. It denies the systematic problems that a Free Press report and hundreds of pages of court rulings have shown.
Granholm can give her blessing to Corrections' refusal to fix, or even acknowledge, its own mistakes, or she can take the more rational and humane course of not appealing Enslen's order and working to make the modest and sensible changes it requires.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
