No justice for Alabama’s HIV+ prisoners
By
Judy Greenspan
San Francisco
Published Aug 12, 2005 10:52 PM
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.
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