The NYTimes had another good editorial in yesterday's paper. This one was about the preventable and very dangerous infectious disease epidemic that's going on in prisons around the country. Here's their point:
The United States would experience less infectious disease — which means fewer deaths and less strain on the health system — if the public health apparatus were fully extended into the jails and prisons. The health status report argues convincingly for a rigorous program of testing, treating and counseling that would slow the spread of disease and alert inmates to illnesses before they reached the crisis stage and became prohibitively expensive to handle.
This is a complete no-brainer to me. We have people in prison living in health conditions that Victorian England would have thought barbaric. Even if we can live with that (and Heaven help us if we can), the diseases that the prisons are incubating have a direct path out to the general population every day. Ignoring prisoner health issues unnecessarily costs money and wastes lives.
I first read about this problem in Harper's in a story by Wil S. Hylton. I found it reprinted here. Mr. Hylton writes about Correctional Medical Services, a company that provides healthcare services to prisons and jails. In light of the recent SCOTUS decision regarding patients' rights to sue HMOs:
Correctional Medical Services is not merely the nation’s largest provider of prison medicine; it is also the nation’s cheapest provider, a perfect convergence of big business and low budgets. But unlike the traditional HMO, whose risk of a malpractice suit is real, and is felt, and is reflected to at least some degree in the quality of medical care, companies such as CMS have little or no reason to protect themselves. Most juries are reluctant to decide in favor of a convict, and those juries that do favor the convict are often reluctant to award money. Cost-benefit analysis takes on special, human overtones behind bars.
After a long, informative and painfully unforgettable article, Mr. Hylton draws the same correct conclusion that the NYTimes did:
But if the battle over prison health care is beginning to seem lost, littered with the bodies of the wounded, the sick and sickened alike, with inmates and nurses and journalists by the wayside, if the whole field seems deathly unwell and bordering on hopeless, it may, in the end, have more to do with the way we look at prisons in general than with anything CMS has done. This is not to obscure or to apologize for the company's failures and crimes. It is simply to suggest that the secrecy afforded to prisons would be easy enough to strip away. When we, as a culture, choose to see our prisoners as a part of our society (which they are, of course, and an ever growing part), when we remove the wall of secrecy that surrounds the prison itself when we are willing to face and bear witness to the punishments we disburse, there will be no more need to wonder what is being done on the inside, in our names.
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