Eugene weekly., March 12, 2015, Page 13, Image 13

Though he was carrying antibiotics for the infection,
Tommy says jail staff denied him access to the medicine,
instead sending his health report to the jail health care
provider to fill his prescription. They then sent him to a
room that inmates call “the fishbowl” — a plain, purgatory-
like room with chairs and a TV where inmates wait to be
told where they’ll be staying in the jail.
To Tommy’s dismay, fearing that he might spread his
staph infection to other inmates, he was placed in one of
the dormitories.
Dormitories, sometimes called “gen pop” (general
population) by inmates, are large, open rooms containing
around 35 to 50 beds lined against a wall. They are self-
contained living centers with classrooms, video visitation
stations, tables for eating and socializing, and communal
sinks, toilets and showers.
Dorms resemble a less sinister version of Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon design, arranged side-by-side in a
circular shape and under constant scrutiny from officers
stationed at a central observation post behind a glass wall.
The officers do not have guns, instead carrying pepper
foam and Tasers.
When inmates are booked into the jail they are given a
“risk-assessment tool” that classifies them based on their
current charges, past convictions and institutional behavior.
Primarily, this is to determine if an inmate is dangerous
enough that he should be put in a single cell rather than
into general population.
An inmate deemed virally contagious is placed into a
“negative pressure cell” that restricts airflow in and out.
For Michael, his jail experience started on the UO
campus. One stormy evening last spring, after studying in
the architecture library, he says he fell asleep on a
Lawrence Hall bench while waiting for the rain to stop,
near a classroom in which he had studied Russian more
than 50 years ago. Campus police officers found him and
placed him on a list barring him from campus.
Over the decades, Michael, who has taken classes at the
university and says he cherished it as a friendly, diverse
space to exchange ideas, considered this unacceptable. To
stop spending time on campus because of this
“unconstitutional process,” Michael says, “would be to
succumb to that ignorance and malfeasance.”
On Aug. 1, after being spotted on campus again,
Michael was pulled over by two campus police vehicles on
his way across Kincaid and driven to jail.
By the time Michael arrived at the jail, he was
indignant. As they processed him and his possessions, they
ordered him to put his nose on the wall, blinding him to
what they were doing. When they inquired about his
current medications and ailments, he says that he refused
to tell them anything in order to retain some dignity and
control of his situation, explaining that it was privileged
information.
Before he signed off that they had his cash, Michael
made them count it in front of him. Because of this
attitude, Michael thinks, he was led not to the fishbowl but
a single cold cell with a wooden bench, a toilet and a sink.
Guards refused to give him a blanket, paper, pencil or
Bible. It was past dinnertime at the jail. Michael sat.
HEALTHCARE BEHIND BARS
To care for someone you are also punishing is a strange
task. With an average intake at Lane County Jail of 30 new
inmates per day, or 30 new inmates to see and treat, it is also
a logistical nightmare. And they don’t make it look easy.
In July 2012, the jail transitioned from overseeing its
own medical services to a contract with the Tennessee-
based, many-tentacled correctional health care provider
Corizon. Serving 345,000 inmates around the U.S.,
Corizon is the country’s biggest private corrections health
care provider.
According to a 2013 article published by Florida
Bulldog, Corizon facilities across the country had
previously been sued 660 times for malpractice, and an
Associated Press article this January reported that Corizon
has lost five state prison contracts.
Corizon employees at the jail all sign contracts stating
they will not communicate with the media, and at press
time Corizon had not responded to requests for more
information on its written procedures.
One procedure, according to Buckwald, is to provide
everything in-house: Incoming inmates must sign a
medical release form so that Corizon staff can contact the
inmate’s pharmacy or doctor and get their prescriptions
filled by the jail pharmacy (if the jail pharmacy doesn’t
have an inmate’s prescriptions, they send out runners to
snag them at a local pharmacy).
When a nurse visited Michael on his first night, he was
in a slightly more peaceful mood. “My doctor has told me
I could have a heart attack if I don’t have the right
medication and I don’t take it on a regular basis,” Michael
says, “so I had to balance the reality of my situation with
my personal political beliefs.”
According to Michael, the nurse had retrieved his list of
four prescriptions from his pharmacy and wanted to bring
them to Michael. But Michael says he needed a sign that
they were “honorable.” The nurse said he understood
Michael’s apprehension and brought Michael just one of his
prescriptions, the only one the pharmacy had in individual
packaging to prove its contents. Michael swallowed it.
The next day, with a better sense that he could trust the
medical staff, he took all four.
Although Corizon’s process for giving inmates
medication reduces the risk of contraband drugs inside the
jail, it leaves inmates unable to take both the medications
they have on them and herbal treatments (e.g. milk thistle,
which reduces the death rate for hepatitis C).
“The trust is gone,” Sierralupe says. “They already
know that they are prisoners, and they don’t get to make
any kind of decision at all. But to personally empower
someone so that they can make their body feel healthier is
one of the ways that you make somebody a better citizen.”
For others who live on the streets, the medical care they
receive in jail is enough relief to validate it as an institution.
“The jail saved my life,” Bret says with zero irony. The
homeless man says that when he was picked up by the
police for probation violation in 2009 and dropped off at
the jail, he could barely walk. He says that he had been
having an excruciating breakout of staph infection on his
shin for four months, and the rotted skin allowed blood to
pour down his leg and into his shoe.
jail, particularly the jail’s “hell of a good book selection,”
which led him to discover the writings of Tom Robbins.
This is not to say Marty doesn’t need medical attention
— he suffers from pancreatic cancer. Lacking better
options, he has chosen to “run it out” and does not expect
the jail to treat him. Care is expensive, he points out.
CRISIS INTERVENTION
“Once people are on the street, it takes a couple of
weeks, a month, maybe a year, and the streets just take
them,” Sierralupe says. “You see a perpetual state of
PTSD. And that itself is something that erodes spirit and
makes people have behaviors that make it difficult for
them to survive in a regular setting. That causes some
damage to your psyche. So if you don’t have mental illness
when you start, you’ll get there.”
According to the 2013 One Night Homeless Count,
among the 1,751 homeless people documented in Lane
County, 202 (or 11 percent) were described as “severely
mentally ill.” Sierralupe, who participated in this year’s
January count, views those numbers as “very, very low,”
estimating that for every homeless person counted, there
may have been two left uncounted.
As for the designation of mental illness, she says, it’s
pure speculation — mental illness comes in many shades,
making it difficult for police to identify. And, says Lt.
Buckwald, jails have become the de facto mental health
facilities.
Mental illness makes it more difficult for those suffering
from it to communicate their struggles with law
enforcement. As a result, testimony from mentally ill
inmates is often extreme, and sometimes is available only
through attorneys and other representatives. This was true
in the case of Mark Kemp and in another case involving
mental illness, that of Kelly Green II.
Attorney Regan points out that police have the authority
to bring mentally ill people to the hospital to undergo
psychiatric analyses. But many police officers, she says,
“don’t have any interest in learning how to speak to a
mentally ill person, or how to do crisis intervention.”
Crisis intervention, however, is precisely what the jail
has tried to teach officers in the wake of the Kemp case.
‘We’re not talking about sympathy.
One of my mentally ill inmates said,
“Sympathy is just a word between syphilis and shit.”’
— LANCE COUTURIER, FORMER CHIEF PSYCHOLOGIST
FOR THE PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
After he was processed and admitted into a general
population room, he says, a nurse promptly treated the
infection with antibiotic patches. The infection cleared up
in three days.
According to Sierralupe, staph infections are common
in Lane County’s homeless community: “We serve a
population that wrestle with stress on a level that the
average American can not possibly imagine.” And with
stress, she says, comes a weakened immune system and
increased risk of staph infection.
The routine of jail can take on a different character for
independent-minded homeless inmates without immediate
ailments like Marty, who has been in Eugene since 2013,
is also homeless and has been through the jail seven times.
His perspective on criticisms of the jail is simple: “People
always say the police are the worst.”
Of all the jails Marty has served time in, he says, the
Lane County jail is the best. He says he’s never had an
unpleasant encounter with officers, who he describes as
“politically correct,” and he has even enjoyed aspects of the
According to Lt. Buckwald, officers now are obligated to
do eight hours of yearly training on how to deal with
mentally ill inmates. The courses are based on the idea of
crisis intervention, a method of instilling compassion,
patience and empathy into officers during stressful contact
with the mentally ill.
“We’re not talking about sympathy,” says Lance
Couturier, former chief psychologist for the Pennsylvania
Department of Corrections, and one of the authors of the
materials Lane County Jail uses. “One of my mentally ill
inmates said, ‘Sympathy is just a word between syphilis
and shit.’ Cops and COs [corrections officers] seem to like
that line. We’re just asking you to be able to put yourself
in this guy’s situation, or this gal’s situation.”
One of the foundations of the course is being able to
recognize the four major types of mental disorders —
psychotic disorders, depressive disorders, behavior
disorders and anxiety disorders — and learning how to
responsibly interact with inmates who seem to be suffering
from them.
eugeneweekly.com • March 12, 2015
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