Trial Date

This blog was written in November, 2014. 

            Less than 30 days from now a Federal Court will hear a suit brought by 5 female offenders at Virginia’s Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. The class action lawsuit, filed in 2012, seeks injunctory relief from VDOC for its mismanagement of medical care for those behind bars. Be ready Virginia; VDOC will lose this case and the budget woes already affecting the Commonwealth will only worsen. Look no further than the bloated, arrogant, mismanaged bureaucracy that is VDOC when you ask “why.”

            At a time when the voters of the Commonwealth were quick to elect any politician who said they were “tough on crime,” DOC realized it had a problem. Everything has a cost and that’s especially true in prison. You want to lock up virtually anyone for anything (after all, a majority of those behind bars are there for non-violent crimes) there is a cost. And a major cost associated with longer sentences, with mass incarceration policies, is the cost to provide medical care. The Commonwealth knew they had a burgeoning problem years ago.

            What was their solution? Outsourcing. VDOC concluded that it was cheaper to contract out offender medical care than provide staff doctors. So the state entered into a sweetheart (for the for-profit corporations anyway!) contract first with Armor, later with Corizon, both “players” in the booming prison-industrial complex that has seen U.S. corrections expenditures go from $6 billion in 1980 to $80 billion today. The state agreed to pay these companies $76 million per contract year to provide medical care and case management for the incarcerated. That sounds like a lot of money (and it is) except those companies had their own staffing costs. They also had a population they were servicing that was less healthy than the general population, with diabetes and mental disorders rampant. Keeping costs down became the benchmark. Forget Hippocrates; their mantra was, “every buck saved is a buck for our bottom line.”

            Then, VDOC gave almost no thought or care to the “work” these private contractors did as long as the department was not responsible. Trouble is, VDOC – and the Commonwealth – can’t shirk their obligation to provide medical care to those in its custody. That’s the law. Funny, isn’t it? All those “law and order” types suddenly became very “shades of grey” when it comes to government doing what they are legally obligated to do.

            That provides background to the suit – government ineptitude followed by sweetheart contracts with no oversight. But, to the women involved, it is more personal. To the patients – and their families – who were ignored and mistreated, their poor care, the 3 or 4 deaths each year resulting from negligent health care at Fluvanna, it was personal. You break the law, you go to prison. You shouldn’t end up dying because of bad medical care, which the state is required to provide when they take away your freedom.

            My first year here I befriended a bright, young redheaded kid. He had gone drag racing one night with three other cars. These were county roads in Augusta County. And these 18 to 20 year-olds were going way too fast, being reckless. Then it happened. He lost control and his car went airborne. His girlfriend lay dying in his car. The charge was vehicular manslaughter; the sentence was four years. I make no judgment on the leniency – or severity – of his time. Parents lost a daughter. Four years or forty, that will never be made whole.

            They sent him here and late in ’09 he began having severe stomach pains. He ran a fever. He passed blood. Medical refused to see him. “You’re on the sick call list,” he was told. His mother called and complained and Medical gave him an appointment. Stomach virus was the diagnosis “Take Mylanta.” That night his fever spiked. The floor officer rushed him down to medical and he was immediately taken to the hospital with a ruptured appendix.

            That story isn’t an aberration; that story is day-to-day medical care inside. “Care” is not the right word. Every year men and women die behind bars from medical neglect. That is criminal and should not be tolerated. That is the basis of these five women’s lawsuit.

            How has the government reacted to the suit? They have stonewalled. This past summer the court was so incensed by DOC’s refusal to comply with discovery that it awarded the Plaintiffs over $16,000 in attorney fees. Ironic isn’t it, the purveyors of the law, those charged with administering the law, ignore the law. Who pays? The taxpayers.

            The late Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post cited Walter Lippmann in a lecture he gave in 1997 at the University of California. Lippmann, Mr. Bradlee noted, believed that “In a democracy, the truth emerges. Sometimes it takes years … sometimes it seems to take forever, but it does emerge.”

            Mr. Bradlee, the Executive editor of the Post from 1968 to 1991 knew a little something about the truth and the attempts over and over again by government to spin it and shape it and distort it. But, at the end, the truth will emerge.

            For far too many years the Commonwealth of Virginia’s politicians, supported and greased by companies like Corizon and Armor have told voters you are safer with more people behind bars. These politicians have lied about the true costs the people of Virginia incur with these reckless policies built on greed. But the truth will emerge … and it may start on December 1^st in a Federal courthouse when the Department of Correction’s medical contracts are exposed for what they are.