RIGHT-SIZING CORRECTIONS: Don't fight prison health care cure
May 9, 2007
The state chose to close Southern Michigan Correctional Facility partly to remove it from federal oversight.
That strategy evidently backfired on Friday, when U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen rejected a plan to transfer more than 600 chronically ill and disabled inmates out of the Jackson prison. Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said Tuesday the department will seek an emergency stay that would allow the state to close the prison, but delays could cost millions of dollars. Instead of resisting, the state should fix longstanding problems with prison health care.
Corrections had planned to send medically fragile inmates to other facilities and shutter the 1,300-bed prison by July -- all to save $35 million a year. But Enslen called the plan a "shell game" and ordered the state to come up with a plan that ensures sick inmates' safety.
Adding to the state's medical-related prison woes, a federal jury in Lansing handed down a $2.75-million verdict Friday against MDOC employees for the wrongful death of a mentally ill inmate, 39-year-old Jeffrey Clark. In July 2002, he died of dehydration in an Ionia prison after spending four days alone in a hot observation cell. According to court documents, he was naked on the floor, in full rigor mortis, with vomit encrusted on his mouth. The water to Clark's cell was turned off, and the toilet was dry.
A Free Press editorial page investigation last year exposed other dangerous and grave problems with Michigan's prison health care system. Corrections has been under a federal consent decree since 1985 to improve medical care and other conditions at prisons in Jackson. Still, earlier this year, the court's independent medical monitor found worsening problems at Southern Michigan.
Delaying improvements and fighting federal oversight are not good strategies for meeting government's constitutional obligation to provide adequate medical care to prisoners. Nor is it a good way to protect taxpayers, who will ultimately pay for this neglect.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
