No justice for Alabama’s HIV+ prisoners

An investigation of the treatment of male prisoners with HIV/AIDS in Ala bama’s Limestone Prison, reported in the Aug. 1 New York Times, has again shone a spotlight on the criminally negligent care received by prisoners with serious and life-threatening diseases in this country’s prisons. Alabama, one of the states that led the country in Jim Crow racist segregation laws, continues these practices today in its prisons.

When the early cases of HIV/AIDS were discovered in U.S. prisons in the mid-1980s, the first response was to isolate and segregate those prisoners. Prisoners were forced to live apart from the rest of the prison population. They were denied programs, jobs and education opportunities inside the prison.

That segregation also amounted to gross medical neglect and serious human-rights abuses. Segregating prisoners did not mean that they received stellar care. In fact, just the opposite. Prisoners became victims of beatings and psychological violence by guards and an AIDS-phobic prison system.

Segregating prisoners with HIV/AIDS help to criminalize, stigmatize and demonize prisoners living with the disease. It did little or nothing to provide proper care for prisoners with serious illnesses.

Since those early days of the epidemic, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and most state prison systems have housed prisoners with HIV/AIDS in the general prison population.

Alabama is the only prison system in the country that maintains a draconian system of segregation of prisoners with HIV/ AIDS. Limestone Prison, near Huntsville, has created a prison within a prison in which to isolate and maintain complete control over its 230 known HIV+positive prisoners.

This “control” has caused the unnecessary deaths of countless prisoners.

Doctor resigns in protest

In 2004, as the result of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by 240 HIV+ prisoners, Prison Health Services, a private company responsible for Ala bama’s prison health care, hired Dr. Valda Chijide. An infectious disease specialist, Dr. Chijide thought she was being hired as the doctor for prisoners with HIV/AIDS.

She soon found out that she was supposed to singlehandedly provide care for all 1,800 prisoners at Limestone prison.

Dr. Chijide, who had never worked in a prison before, didn’t know about the court settlement and the history of poor care when she took the job with Prison Health Services. She was immediately outraged by the abysmal living conditions and negligent health care in the HIV unit.

She found the housing unit to be “riddled with rats, where broken windows had been replaced with plastic sheeting that was falling apart.” Her medical orders were ignored or frequently countermand ed by improperly trained medical staff.

She could not even find soap in the infirmary where the sickest prisoners were kept. She had to walk to another building so that she could wash her hands between visits.

Dr. Chijide resigned after holding her position for three months. Before resigning, she wrote a 10-page critique of the criminal care at Limestone, which she shared with Dr. Joe Bick, the court monitor. She complained bitterly about the way that Prison Health Services ran medical care in that state.

“If you bring up a problem that they won’t want to hear about, they will attack you,” Dr. Chijide stated. “I felt better resigning than staying on and bending my principles to their principles.”

Profit-hungry prison corporations

If the number of lawsuits filed against Prison Health Services is any indication, the private company has no principles. Prison Health Services, one of the several profit-hungry companies to appear on the prison-health-care horizon, has faced more than 1,000 lawsuits for its delivery of poor medical and psychiatric care in this country’s jails and prisons.

Yet this is the company that was chosen after the 2004 class-action settlement to clean up the crisis in medical care for prisoners with HIV/AIDS in Alabama. Despite the recent national media exposure and almost daily attention to the many abuses suffered by prisoners under the company’s care, Prison Health Services continues as the contract provider of prisoner care in Alabama.

The firm is even bidding to take over care in the San Francisco jails.

Medical care at the state’s women’s prison—Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, in Wetumpka, Ala.—is no better. That prison, which is also under contract with Prison Health Services, has been the target of several class-action lawsuits brought by women prisoners for better care.

This past year, as part of an ongoing lawsuit, the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based legal- and human-rights office, investigated the deaths of three women prisoners in two months at Tutwiler.

One woman who died had been placed in lock-up shortly after receiving a mastectomy. According to Vanessa Filley, an investigator with SCHR, the woman was sitting in prison on a parole violation and just deteriorating. The prison did nothing to provide any care that would have saved her life.

The Southern Center for Human Rights has represented prisoners all over the South in class-action lawsuits for justice, dignity and decent medical care.

Prison is big business, as the proliferation of 32 prisons in the state of California clearly attests. International watchdog agencies like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Now have released extensive exposés of torture and neglect in this country’s prisons and detention centers.

Most prisoner-advocacy organizations and health-care-rights groups have loudly opposed both private prisons and the privatization of health care.

Alabama’s criminally negligent system is only one example of the human-rights abuses faced by prisoners in this country. It is the profit system that drives not only the war machine but the prison-industrial complex that creates these concentration camps for the poor.

Greenspan worked as a paralegal for the ACLU National Prison Project. She interviewed Tutwiler and Limestone prisoners living with HIV/AIDS during the late 1980s when the first lawsuit against the segregation and neglect of HIV+ prisoners was filed. Greenspan is currently the co-coordinator of the HIV/Hepatitis C Committee of California Prison Focus.