![\"women_prisoners_incarceration_arrest_ziptied_police\"](\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/2837737973_1a6e7da41c_o-600x433.jpg\")
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tomirish7 \/ Flickr<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I received a letter recently from a female inmate in a state prison in Arizona. She wrote about some of the same things I complained about when I was incarcerated.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, she said. It\u2019s overcrowded. There aren\u2019t enough jobs, and even if you get one, you make a slave\u2019s wage \u2014 often just 10 cents an hour. There\u2019s no money for training programs, prisoners are never actually \u201crehabilitated,\u201d and the food is inedible.<\/p>\n
None of these were surprising to me. The American prison system is broken. I know that from first-hand experience.<\/p>\n
But one issue the writer raised was especially concerning. I\u2019ve written before, including in my\u00a0blog posts<\/a> from prison, about medical care there. I sometimes wondered if things were any better in women\u2019s prisons. Apparently they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n \u201cThe health care here is horrible,\u201c the writer said. \u201cCheck to see how many women have died here in the last two years because of improper health care. Women who complain of chest pains are sent back to their cell and told there is nothing wrong, to drink water, and to take an aspirin.\u201d<\/p>\n I believe her. My prison bunkmate complained of chest pains for months and was told to take an aspirin. He finally had a massive heart attack. After a month spent chained to a bed in a local hospital, he was transferred to a prison hospital 11 hours away from his family. He\u2019ll never make it to the end of his sentence.<\/p>\n The woman who wrote me this letter had seen the same thing.<\/p>\n There was a woman there, she wrote, who \u201cwas bleeding for months.\u201d The inmate \u201ckept putting in requests to see a doctor and was told repeatedly that there was nothing wrong. Finally, eight months later, she was sent to an outside specialist and told that she had cervical cancer that was so far progressed that all they could do was to put her in chemo to slow it down.\u201d<\/p>\n The prognosis? \u201cThe doctor said her time is limited. She\u2019s going to die.\u201d<\/p>\n The real tragedy of this situation is that it\u2019s so common. Prisoners across America<\/a> die every day from substandard medical care.<\/p>\n If the people running prisons know there\u2019s a problem and do nothing about it, is that not manslaughter? Is that not depraved indifference? A person who should be alive is not \u2014 all because of the incompetence or apathy of prison administrators.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t an issue of who did what or who broke what law. Every American deserves decent health care. That includes our prisoners.<\/p>\n If we can\u2019t say that much for the most vulnerable among us, we can\u2019t expect any better for the rest of us.<\/p>\n The post America\u2019s Killer Prisons<\/a> appeared first on OtherWords<\/a>.<\/p>\n This piece was reprinted from Other Words<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Kiriakou I get a lot of letters from people who\u2019ve been incarcerated, or are now behind bars. Legally I can\u2019t respond directly, because I\u2019m an ex-con myself: I was locked up after blowing the whistle on the CIA\u2019s illegal and immoral torture program. Direct contact with current and former prisoners would be \u201cconsorting with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-227596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}