Re:US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infec...
by perl4ever on Friday March 20, 2020 @07:02PM
(#22642627)
"have famously low standards of medical care"
I remember on another forum someone that used to post, who claimed to be a former IT worker who decided to go to nursing school, you know, because he wanted to do something "real" and then he graduated and could only get a job working in a prison. Some stuff he described was pretty chilling, even in its understatement.
Re:US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infec...
by Fjolsvith on Saturday March 21, 2020 @01:34AM
(#22644758)
I've done time in state and federal prisons. While I've never been without soap or water or been in an overcrowded facility, the medical care is very bad.
At an older federal prison, we had to check shoes in the morning for brown recluse spiders. One guy got bit on his foot by one of them and it quickly turned black and blue. He went to medical and they diagnosed him as having a fracture, and set a cast on his foot without doing an x-ray (which would have meant a trip out to a hospital).
Several weeks later they had to amputate his leg below the knee.
It’s the worst possible place for anyone to be in a situation like this.
When this hits jails, very nearly everyone in the jails will be exposed, and the death rates are likely to be roughly equivalent to the critical case rates (>15%).
A more cynical person might claim that the people responsible for allocating medical resources and oversight to prisons see this as a generally desirable outcome; the system working as intended. (Jails in the US disproportionately hold nonwhite people.)