Fuck Yeah Prison Inmates

Today more than ever, inmates are growing old and dying in prison – and costing the state several millions of dollars. The most expensive California prisoners have medical bills ranging from $100,000 to $2.5 million each, according to the federally appointed receiver who oversees the state’s prison health care. A federal receiver was appointed to run the system after California was declared incapable of providing adequate heath care to its inmates as the result of a 2001 lawsuit.

The average 55-year-old inmate has the health of someone 10 years older because of substance abuse or poor health before incarceration and the hardships of prison life. Aging inmates cost two to three times more than younger prisoners – on average more than $100,000 per inmate per year, according to a the National Institute of Corrections.

The California Medical Facility in Vacaville was established in 1955 as a medical psychiatric institution for male prisoners. Today, it is the state’s leading prison hospital and operates with a $171 million budget.

Inmate patient and convicted murderer Kerry Jackson holds up a picture of his family in his room on June 30. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1990, when he said he killed a man who molested one of his sons. Prior to the murder conviction, Jackson had been in and out of prison for grand theft, credit card fraud and passing bad checks.

Hooked to a catheter and wheelchair bound, 50-year-old Jackson is unable to stand without assistance. Jackson has reached the age considered to be “elderly” by prison standards. Prisoners, on average, have the health of someone 10 years older.

The facility houses about 2,800 inmates. More than 90 percent have chronic medical and/or mental health conditions, including Jackson. The top causes of death in the prison are liver disease, trauma, cardiac and pulmonary problems, infectious disease, substance abuse and cancer.

“I forget a lot of stuff and my doctor remembers it for me,” Jackson said. He couldn’t remember his birthday, but he recalled his age and his crimes with ease. Jackson said he had a heart attack, a stroke and broke nearly all of his bones when a truck once hit him, and head trauma has left him developmentally disabled.

Originally from Ontario, Calif., Jackson is carrying out his life sentence in this prison hospital room.

Jackson said he thinks he deserves to die behind bars. He said he thought he was doing the right thing when he committed his crime, but ended up causing more harm than good by leaving his six children fatherless.

Inmate patient David Terry lies in his hospital cell bed. The 40-year-old prisoner is slow moving and hardly able to talk. He said it hurt to move. Severe arthritis and AIDS wrack his body.

Terry shows off some of the tattoos that cover much of his body. Terry is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for first-degree murder, and was committed in Orange County in 1990.

Terry was transferred to the California Medical Facility for treatment. He is one of more than 400 HIV-infected inmates at the prison.

Former inmate Frederick Gusta was convicted in 2002 for stealing a car, kidnapping and making terrorist threats. He was previously convicted for voluntary manslaughter. His terminally-ill condition earned him a spot in the prison hospice unit, the first licensed prison-based hospice in the world for terminally ill patients. It has 17 beds, but a needs assessment prepared for the federally appointed receiver who oversees prison health care concluded that the prison system would need 59 hospice beds by 2013.

Gusta was granted compassionate release after he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He had less than six months to live. There are more than 2,000 inmates in the California prison system who need long-term care. That number is expected to double this decade, according to an assessment update prepared for the federally appointed receiver overseeing health care in California’s 33 adult prisons.

Rising prison rape ‘shames Westminster’, requires urgent investigation – report RT, rt.com

A huge portion of the population doesn’t have the right to vote

Three in 10 black men can expect to lose their right to vote at some point in their lives, according to data from 2010 compiled by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that works to reform the criminal justice system. In Florida, Kentucky and Virginia, which have some of the harshest felon disenfranchisement laws, 1 in 5 African-Americans is denied the right to vote.

Two of my favorite things:

Convicts &kitties.

At Washington state penitentiary, there’s a kitten foster program, “Kittens in the Klink,” in partnership with Blue Mountain Humane Society. Convicts are paired with motherless cats needing bottle feeding, cuddling and help to learn to not bite and claw. The temporary guardian cares for the cat until it’s old enough to go to the animal shelter for adoption.

On February 25, 2014, Orange is the New Black author Piper Kerman testified at the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearings on solitary confinement in Washington, DC. Unlike her fictional character, Kerman was never placed in solitary confinement. But she testified about the many women incarcerated alongside her who had:

While I was in prison, I saw many women sent to the SHU for minor infractions such as moving around a housing unit during a count, refusing an order from a correctional officer, and possession of low-level contraband like small amounts of cash (which is largely useless in prison) or having women’s underwear from the outside rather than prison-issued underwear. All of these infractions drew at least 30 days in solitary. Sometimes women are sent to the SHU immediately upon their arrival in prison because there aren’t any open beds.

Most politicians would rather ignore the reality of the problems with the prison system than address them head-on and risk being seen as “soft on crime.”Orange is the New Black—and Kerman’s determined attempt to link the peoples’ interest in the fictional story to real women’s suffering—has helped get Americans talking about prison in a way few pieces of pop culture have. It’s also a way to get people talking about women in the prison system rather than focusing the conversations around men. It’s also a sad truth that politicians and Americans in general are more likely to listen to a celebrity telling them about prison conditions than someone who didn’t become famous after being incarcerated. To her credit, Kerman (unlike some other celebrities who have experienced short stints behind bars) has been using her platform to advocate for change.

How many people do we imprison in America? So many that 100,000 will die… of old age.