Medical staff use denied care to abuse prisoners: A case in South Carolina

By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Tyrone Perry is a 46-year-old Black man imprisoned in South Carolina’s Perry Correctional Institution (PCI). He’s been imprisoned in South Carolina for 20 years. Throughout this time he’s endured medical and mental health neglect while suffering degenerative brain disease and life-threatening medical conditions.

Mr. Perry suffers from pulmonary hypertension, diastolic dysfunction and small vessel disease in his brain. His conditions require ongoing monitoring and assessments of his blood pressure and heart by on-site providers and hospital specialists and chronic care. His brain disease causes him frequent headaches, serious seizures and leaves him in danger of suffering brain aneurysms, early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

In response to his efforts and complaints to receive the most basic care, he has been met with hostility and retaliation by the very prison health professionals who are responsible for his care and who’ve left him without treatment.

On July 18, 2025, Perry went to PCI’s medical department with complaints of tingling on his left side and chest pain. A nurse, Alvarez, took his blood pressure (BP) which read 163/110, then 160/115 — dangerously high readings. Rather than render him medical aid, Alvarez attempted to conceal the reading from Perry and sent him back to his cell.

Through persistence, Perry was able to gain the attention of nurse practitioner A. Enloe, PCI’s chief medical provider. But instead of helping him, she had him put out of the medical department without treatment. These nurses were cruelly indifferent to the fact that Perry’s high BP reading could have been symptomatic or indicative of cardiac arrest or a stroke.

To make matters worse, these nurses were/are the cause of his elevated BP in the first place. They not only refuse to regularly monitor his BP levels but further deny his physician-prescribed medications. They have also obstructed him for months from seeing his heart doctor, Dr. Murelli at MUSC [Medical University of South Carolina] Health.

Perry is but one example of multitudinous, crass medical indifference and mistreatment by South Carolina prison medical staff to the often life-threatening medical needs of prisoners, who have recourse to no other care. The situation escapes public scrutiny and accountability, because South Carolina prisoners are stripped of a public voice by their corrupt captors, who subject them to rules that forbid them from speaking to the media and punish those who try. In this way, these officials monopolize and create false public narratives that dehumanize and villainize the prisoners and conceal their mistreatment.

I am both witness to and victim of this abuse, having myself been denied dental care for some two months for a potentially deadly abscessed tooth.

South Carolina prisoners need both an outside voice and support.

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is a prison journalist, jailhouse lawyer and revolutionary political educator incarcerated in 1990.