In the Red

This blog was written in October, 2014            

So the Governor announces last week that the budget is a mess (quote: “We can’t continue to rely on the Federal Government …” Beautiful!) and DOC – the state’s most bloated, inefficient, and largest department – will bear the brunt of the cuts. Less than three days later, the DOC’s Director, Harold Clarke, announces that the budget for inmate medical care is $43 million in the red. Big surprise? It shouldn’t be. See, one of the effects of tougher, longer sentences is that you’re locking up a whole lot of people for a whole lot of years; people who had poor health care before conviction; people who were on the fringe of the American dream. And Virginia’s prosecutors and Judges, with arrogance and smug self-righteousness, pile dozens of years on these schmoos – most of whom lack proper education, proper health care, proper housing and employment opportunities – and puff their chests and say “we’re making our communities safer.” Yeah right.

            $43 million in the red. DOC knows that almost half those behind bars have legitimately diagnosed mental disorders. DOC’s answer? Load these men and women with high doses of psychotropic drugs with side effects such as liver damage and suicidal thoughts. Let them check in with an overworked psychiatrist via “video” conference for five minutes each three or four months.

            “Hello. How are you? Any problems? See you in May.”

            Incarcerated persons have drug addiction issues, which leads to higher rates of Hep C inside the fences versus society at large. Drug addicts willing to smoke or shoot up anything for the high have bad dental hygiene, blood disorders, psychiatric abnormalities. Diabetes is rampant inside prison and yet the diet fed behind bars is high in starches and carbs (hey, it’s cheap!).

            $43 million in the red. By the time an offender reaches 65, he will cost the taxpayers over $75,000 per year to house and maintain him. Statistics show that inmates over 50 have the lowest recidivism rates. Yet, Virginia lets no one go early. The state has both geriatric and medical release available yet Governors from both parties refuse to use it (McDonnell, in his last year in office, granted 3 medical paroles). DOC maintains one facility – Deerfield for the aged and chronically infirmed. 1,000 men housed there with a substantial number biding their time until they die. Think I’m kidding? Look at the number who die each year at Deerfield; look at the number suffering Alzheimer’s and dementia and cardiac disease.

            $43 million in the red. That doesn’t include the number of inmates who need heart transplants, kidney and liver transplants. DOC operates and maintains Marion, a psychiatric prison for the criminally insane. The cost for each person there exceeds $100,000 per year. And I wonder, as I see 75-year-old men using walkers to get around here, how incapacitated must you be to get sent to Deerfield? I see men babbling incoherently. I know max security at Red Onion has over 700 of the state’s worst, including many with psychopathic tendencies, and they don’t qualify for Marion. And I wonder who’s in charge? Where’s the logic, the structure, the organization to any of this because, candidly, DOC may stand for “damnable old cluster-fuck.”

            $43 million in the red. Then Governor McDonnell at his inauguration touted a new approach to corrections. Re-entry – returning men and women back to their communities after they “paid their debt to society” – became a linchpin of his administration with much fanfare and ado he brought in Harold Clarke, the then director of Massachusetts’s DOC. New buzzwords popped up inside prisons: “healing environment,” and “re-entry matrix,” and “thinking for a change.” But, like the old line goes, “if you put lipstick on a pig it’s still a pig.”

            “Healing environment” – yeah right. Prison is prison. Most of the folks in charge don’t give a rat’s ass for the notion of healing. Prisons are still dirty, backward, unhealthy (and at a lot of locations, unsafe) places. And Clarke? He came in touting his Christian upbringing, his “mission” to change prisoner’s lives. Clarke has proven to be a snake-oil salesman. His only mission, it appears, is to self-promote. I wonder Mr. Clarke what Jesus would say about your tenure as DOC chief? I wonder how Jesus would run DOC? Instead of Jesus, perhaps Mr. Clarke should ponder these words from Bob Dylan –

            “All the money you make will never buy back your soul.”

            $43 million in the red. Re-entry is a colossal failure and DOC knows it. The initial recidivism numbers show that offenders going through the program actually reoffend at a higher rate. Why? Because success outside is built on (1) employability and (2) family connections. Education – higher education – reduces recidivism not the inane crap they do with “word of the day” and “thinking reports.”

            $43 million in the red. That number will get worse. Every bill comes due and Virginia’s DOC bill – years of corruption and ineptitude – is in the mail. What it will take is a good ass kicking. The mission for DOC has to be to incarcerate the worst; use community corrections and restorative justice principles for most nonviolent offenses; and, invest in education, job training, and health care.

            $43 million in the red. Hey Virginia, it’s time to ask Harold to pay the bill.