Something is eating my brain he said
I could smell blood before I even went into the room
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Teresa Short was working as a patient care technician in an Arizona prison in 2014 when she lost her job. A patient care technician is what you call a nurse I guess because then you can bill more for the job due to it has the word technology in it.
She had contracted scabies from a prisoner and having already infected a member of her family she thought it would be unethical to continue treating patients so she said fuck it I’m not coming in. Her employer Corizon Health is the largest private company that provides care technology for inmates in the country and takes in around $1.5 billion in revenue a year and they weren’t happy about her banging out of work so they fired her ass. There have to be standards you see. You can’t just start letting people do whatever it is they want which would be called chaos.
Short did what a lot of people who get fired do which is she said fuck me? no fuck you and started talking about a lot of the problems she had seen at her job. The biggest problem she told Al Jazeera America was that there simply weren’t enough staff to provide the level of care technology you might expect from a cutting edge company like Corizon.
“We are the industry pioneers,” former Corizon CEO Rich Hallworth said in a video a few years back. They’ve been in operation under a variety of names for about forty years. “We are the innovators. Our team is unmatched in knowledge and passion.”
Hallworth made almost $1 million a year when he was saying shit like that so you can understand why he might have a sunny outlook about what all it is that Corizon does.
A lot of Short’s patients had dementia she said and they didn’t understand how to feed themselves so they would sit there going hungry and shitting themselves not knowing what to do. One patient in particular needed a vascular catheter in his arm for dialysis but he didn’t understand what it was so he would play with it and fuck with it and pull it out. She tried to explain that he needed better supervision on one occasion but her bosses didn’t listen probably because that would cost a lot to have someone making sure a mere prisoner didn’t get hurt and so they sent him back off to his cell where they didn’t have to look at him which sounds callous but that’s what we do too don’t we.
How often do you think about the medical care of prisoners probably not that much buddy. If you can’t see it it’s not happening. You’re thinking about it now but then once you stop reading this you’ll think about something else. I gotta go record my emo radio show pretty soon after I finish this up. Here’s one new band I’m really excited about I’m going to play some music from. They’re from Tallahassee which doesn’t seem like a place a very good band should be from.
Then after that I have physical therapy which I’m not particularly looking forward to and somewhere in there I was hoping to j/o but I’m not sure I’ll have time to fit it in. I’m simply too busy I couldn’t possibly j/o at this juncture.
I’ve always been very good at exercising but the type of slow and concentrated movements you have to do in physical therapy require too much focus and I lose interest quickly. Real exercise you can feel you can intuitively understand the results almost immediately in your muscles and it feels like a change is happening but this type of pensive fucking around doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything. How am I supposed to sit there and hold my arm a certain way for ten seconds for three sets of ten reps just holding my arm that way doesn’t seem like it’s going to help so then I stop doing it and I stay being hurt. Change is impossible when you are sitting there trying to change but then one day you’re glad you did it I guess but I wouldn’t know on account of I’ve never managed to change or improve at anything at all as far as I can tell. Who has the time.
So Short went back in to check on the guy with the catheter after a while.
“I could smell blood before I even went into the room,” she told Al Jazeera. “And when I turned on his light, it looked like somebody had been murdered. There was blood all over the room. I screamed for help.”
He had unplugged the catheter and bled out there on the floor of the cell and then died in the cell in his blood.
Here’s part of the response Corizon gave at the time about an increasing number of complaints being made by people like Short and the prisoners themselves whose needs weren’t being taken seriously.
That last part kind of makes my stomach drop because how often do you hear things like that from cops or prison administrators or judges or your family about how the people they have in the cage are filing frivolous complaints and lawsuits and therefore aren’t to be trusted. Of course prisoners are saying they’re being treated unfairly they’re just trying to get one over. And besides that is what prison is for a lot of average people you know and love probably say or think all the time. It’s for treating people unfairly. Can’t do the time don’t do the crime people say and then do not think about what doing the time actually entails for a single other second after and then they go off and complain about how shitty their own healthcare is but can you imagine how much worse it is for an invisible person. You wouldn’t even need to treat them because who would ever see them getting sicker and sicker in the first place. You might as well try to get the average person to care about the wellbeing of elves and fairies because they are as real and tangible as prisoners are to most of us except at least people give magical creatures the benefit of the doubt as to their motives.
Do you know why private companies are running prisons because I don’t. I mean I know it’s because the companies paid politicians off so they could stick their snout into the blood spigot but does it make sense? Should someone be getting rich off of providing health care to prisoners never mind doing a really superfluously shitty job of it? I don’t think so man but who is to say for sure. We need to have a debate about this concept in the marketplace of ideas.
“We believe that incarceration is a uniquely governmental function that should never be contracted out to private, for-profit corporations,” David Fathi the director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project said in 2012. “When you combine the profit motive with limited oversight and an unpopular, politically powerless group like prisoners, it’s a recipe for bad outcomes.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. When you allow Americans the opportunity to profit off of the abuse of marginalized peoples’ bodies they are going to take that chance every time. There’s been no better business to be in in America since the day it was born than feeding bodies into a machine and profiting off of the blood and bone chunks that come out the other end of the massive flesh blender. If you can get the taxpayers to pay you for the privilege all the better.
Corizon was sued for malpractice 660 times in a period of five years according to the ACLU in 2013.
“Corizon's business model: less care, higher profits. People get sicker, Corizon makes more. And somehow it's attracting new customers. Just last week, Corizon inked a five-year, $1.2 billion contractwith the state of Florida. This means that Corizon is now getting taxpayer money in 29 states. And they're vying for more,” the ACLU wrote.
A New Yorker piece from this year put the number of suits against Corizon in the following five years at over one thousand.
You could fill an entire book with stories of the people companies like them have let die or rather killed I guess I could say. You could fill the entire internet and you’d run out of server space if you covered them all the way they should be covered.
How many people are incarcerated in your state? Where is the nearest prison?
Here’s another guy they let die or killed depending on what the meaning of words are. In 2010 a man named Xavius Scullark-Johnson was three months away from getting out for a five month probation violation sentence he was serving when he died in his piss drenched cell after a nurse sent the ambulance that had come for him back according to the Star Tribune.
Although he “had suffered multiple seizures over a period of hours, a nurse at the state prison in Rush City cited ‘protocols’ in turning away an ambulance team sent to take him to a nearby hospital, crew reports show.”
Corizon has had a contract with Minnesota since 1998 and it was worth about $28 million this year.
One way they cut costs there is by not providing overnight medical staff at the vast majority of Minnesota’s prisons. What are the odds someone is going to need emergency care after the sun goes down. Sickness and death keep banker’s hours as everyone knows.
Here’s another fuck up by Corizon although I guess it’s not a fuck up if the point is to make money and disregard the health of their patients. Here’s another win by Corizon I should say this time from Kansas City. A man named Marques Davis had been complaining about severe headaches for months but the Corizon staff ignored him until he got so sick they couldn’t ignore him anymore according to the Kansas City Star. He was so disoriented at the time when they finally took his complaints seriously that he was drinking his own urine. But they were too late and he soon after died from a brain eating fungus at the age of twenty seven. “Something is eating my brain,” he had said.
What do you suppose dying from a brain eating fungus would be like if you were a free person going about the normal business of a life with doctors that at least seemed to want to help you get better? Probably pretty bad man but it can’t be as bad as being locked in a cage with only the fungus in your brain and no one listening or believing you that you are in pain because of some sketchy shit you did years ago or maybe didn’t even do and they just said you did it.
I realize this really isn’t the major issue at work here and that it’s important for newspapers to make money but you really gotta do better than this if you want people to stick around Kansas City Star buddy. This shit is not exactly conducive to a focused reading experience about prison health care contracts.
Davis’ mother is suing Corizon now saying they failed to properly address his neurological symptoms.
Maybe they aren’t at fault though. Maybe the family and the guy were making it up. After all this guy was in prison so you have to believe that he is a liar just like all prisoners are which is the type of thing the people who work in prisons or private companies that profit off of the carceral system surely have to tell themselves so they can sleep at night.
“You have received a one-sided account of his care provided by a personal injury lawyer seeking a damage claim,” Corizon spokeswoman Eve Hutcherson told the Kansas City Star of the lawsuit against them. “Unfortunately, due to this litigation and patient privacy laws, we are unable to provide you with facts that would show a very different perspective.”
Make note of that sidestep Hutcherson did there which is something companies like Corizon and the ones currently profiting off of our despicable immigration policies often do when one of the people in their care gets sick or dies. We cannot comment because we owe the individual privacy. We do not owe them their health or lives but we owe them privacy due to the law which we clearly follow. What can one do. We’d love to be able to help but our hands are tied they say which is another way of saying fuck you and hoping you’ll forget about the dead guy who was after all merely a prisoner.
The thing is there’s no money in providing adequate care in the first place for Corizon and other companies like them.
Corizon has had contracts of almost $2 billion with Kansas and Missouri combined over the past ten years. The less of that they spend on medical care the more they can pocket that’s just basic economics. And since there’s an almost infinite supply of bodies to be churned through the system if one dies there’s little worry about the tap running dry. Suing them doesn’t seem to make a difference either. Kansas alone has levied millions of dollars in fines against the company but they’re like lol ok.
“Corizon is simply writing off the liquidated damages they’re having to pay as the cost of doing business with the state without doing anything meaningful to improve,” Eric Balaban of the ACLU’s National Prison Project told the Star.
If you think all of that sounds fucking terrible and you’re like ah can it get any worse of course it can you dumb ass because a new story about Corizon that came out this week has an even more insidious twist.
An investigation by KJZZ in Arizona has found at least a dozen inmates in the state who are being billed for their medical care provided through Corizon. I’m not sure if you know this but when you’re in prison you’re not supposed to pay for your medical care that is the responsibility of the state. You’re only supposed to pay for things like phone calls at $10 a minute.
One woman named Ashley Wilkeyson was playing softball on her prison team when her ankle snapped in half. She was brought to the hospital and had the ankle set. In the meantime she was sent back to prison to wait for surgery when she started receiving bills in the mail. One was for almost $3,000 she said.
Inmates aren’t supposed to pay for their health care in Arizona. They pay $4 to be seen by the health care provider for their first visit, and all services after that are performed, contracted and paid for by the state’s contractor, Corizon Health. The state pays Corizon $15 per inmate per day for a total annual contract worth $188 million.
People at the prison told her to file a grievance and it would be taken care of according to KJZZ but then the bills kept coming and they haven’t stopped even a year after she was released. On top of all the other hurdles to reintegrating into society bills like these can be overwhelming and navigating the system in which one person passes you on to the next can become a full time job on its own. You know this because you’ve had to deal with it and you’re not even in prison. And that’s before you get to the damage it can do to your credit score at a time when a person trying to find an apartment or a job or a loan to get their lives back on track can least afford it.
In situations like these it appears these bills are coming from third party providers say like a doctor who isn’t working under the umbrella of Corizon who wants to get paid for their labor which is reasonable. The reason they’re sending the bills though isn’t surprising it’s because Corizon tends to stiff them on the tab some of them say. Another former inmate they talked to said he was told that Corizon not paying their bills would impact future care he might have gotten from the hospital in question.
“I was told that I would not be able to return there for any reason because they’re not paying the bill,” Jeffrey LeClair said of one hospital in particular.
Rita Lomio of the Prison Law Office said she had seen inmate medical bills adding up to over $50,000.
She assumes there are many more, as most inmates are unaware they are not obligated to pay the bills. As Arizona ends its contract with Corizon this summer, Lomio fears more collection notices may be sent to the prisons.
“There’s a real concern that Corizon is going to leave all these unpaid bills in its wake,” Lomio cautioned, “and debt collectors are going to be circling the prisons and our clients and the state is going to be left to try to sort of deal with the fallout.”
That phrase there circling the prisons what does that make you think of because it makes me think about vultures which is clearly a pretty good metaphor for all of this shit top to bottom from the cops who arrest people to the politicians who campaign on law and order to the prison administrators to the private contractors to the hospitals to the bill collectors who are maybe the worst of them all. A carcass emerges and the scavengers flock to it all trying to get their beaks wet each jostling each other to get a taste of dead flesh and if all goes well they all fly off satiated until the next body falls and repeat the process.
That’s a pretty good metaphor for the individual actors at work operating on the only instinct they know which is gorging themselves to stay alive but maybe an even better one for the system that makes this all possible would be a brain fungus. We don’t even recognize it’s there but it’s eating away at us from the inside and sometimes we cry out for help hoping someone will come and do something about it but the people who are in a position to stop it aren’t listening so we sit there alone in our cage knowing something is killing us but there’s nothing we can do but let it eat us alive.