This post is primarily about the total breakdown of our judicial system, which is a gigantic drain on our economy. It gives great detail about the reality of this situation concerning one innocent individual with links to more comprehensive articles and information on the topic.
We incarcerate 40 times more people than any civilized country and have made it one of America's biggest industries at the expense of our other potential for productive work and innovation - both from inmates and from the guards, court officials and staff and jail/prison officials and staff running the system. Besides huge profits for the rich and loopholes giving them tax breaks as well as healthcare and defense spending, this is one of the biggest drains on our economy.
This judicial system and the prison/industrial complex are now the largest mental health system in the U.S. and a sword wielded by the corrupt against whistle blowers, as well as a field for corruption conveniently confidential and hard too investigate.
Imagine if all these people and their families were contributing to taxes instead of consuming welfare and tax dollars! Where's the public outcry and activists?
My goal is to be called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and testify about wrongful convictions, judicial misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, and police misconduct, as well as torture, ADA violations, and violation of civil rights regarding access to courts and woefully inadequate medical care by for profit contract groups in prison.
Won't you support our Constitution and fight government corruption by helping us with this goal of transparency and judicial reform?
The Boston Review has an outstanding article about torture in super-max prisons in the United States as a norm.
However if you read the following details you will find torture is not confined in the U.S. to SuperMax prisons. We have no right to criticize torture around the world when we torture as much as does our enemies.
The following is a story about only one individual. Remember this is common in the U.S.
The following details what happened to me, an innocent whistle blower and wrongfully convicted person still fighting to clear my name through appeals. For the full details about my wrongful conviction for battery of an officer read here and read my appeal.
My father, whose half-brother was allegedly disappeared by the Soviets after the 1956 Budapest uprising and who personally had friends who survived the Gestapo and the death camps of WWII told me during the only time he cried in front of me shortly after I returned from a wrongful imprisonment: "Linda, they are doing the same thing to you they did to my brother - first they defame you, then they torture you, and then they kill you, but they haven't killed you YET!".
In my opinion and experience, prison conditions in the US are worse than Abu Ghraib – unethical, illegal, unconstitutional,torturous, and providing no rehabilitative assistance whatsoever. They are warehouses for the mentally ill, drug-addicted, HIV infected, hepatitis C infected, and political prisoners who are innocent. They are "good" jobs for the ignorant, the unemployed rural population who have no work as our jobs were exported overseas and we failed to invest in research and development to make new jobs, and those that are bullies, sociopaths, and psychopaths, and like to inflict pain and torture on others. It is a place you can put people to die inhumanely out of sight and out of mind, and like the monkeys who cover their ears, eyes, and mouth - see no evil and hear no evil, even about innocent persons wrongfully convicted.
In Cook County Jail after this wrongful conviction while incarcerated I was denied a special diet and medications needed for my medical disorders. I was also denied paper and pen and access to the law library. Technically the jail executives say that a law librarian will come to the medical unit and answer requests from inmates for case law and legal research, will notarize documents and help arrange to copy them. They also have a commissary from which you are supposed to be able to buy mailing supplies such as stamps and envelopes.
However, the law librarian, Ms. Jones, would be lying under oath if she testified that this is the case. In practice Ms. Jones is responsible for being present in the law library in Division 2 male law library all day. The few moments before and after the sessions in this law library she is responsible for providing legal services for all of the hundreds of inmates in Cook County Jail Cermak infirmary, all of which are as a matter of a discriminatory policy denied physical access to the law library (due to manpower issues, as well as to hundreds of inmates in another section of the jail and hundreds of inmates coming to the library or segregated in Division 2).
This is an impossible task for jail law librarian Ms. Jones, one person. Ms. Jones' acknowledged to me that therefore she accepts requests for legal research but never does it unless the inmate is physically in the law library. For those in segregation she will only bring laws or cases to the inmate if the inmate gives a complete citation to her that she can look up quickly and print out. Therefore, access to the law library (also defined as access to the courts) is de facto denied.
Therefore, for legal research I relied on snail mail with friends on the outside responding slowly to my requests, starting a month later when I finally was given a pen (jail pen is essentially the plastic cartridge from a Bic-type pen without the plastic holder). This is not access to the courts and is a constitutional violation.
The jail also put me on the TB unit despite no TB infection, and falsely saying they were doing this to protect me from other inmates (administrative segregation), which allowed them to dictate that therefore, I was barred from being taken to the law library and confined to my cell essentially 24 hrs per day. They actually were trying to prevent me from telling the other detainees about their civil rights and the dysfunctional jail system.
As a result of the lack of proper food and medication and due to my severe medical disorders I lost 27 lbs in two months and was dehydrated and very weak when sent to Dwight Correctional Center. My illnesses require an assistive device to walk and include spinal cord injury with headache, chronic pain, and extremely poor balance; chemically induced poorly controlled asthma due to an environmental accident; congenital heart disease including arrhythmias and severe neurally induced episodes of near unconsciousness or unconsciousness with brief cardiac arrest up to 60 seconds; familial tremors; basilar migraines (stroke like symptoms) induced by nitrates and MSG [in almost all the jail food as it is essentially garbage - and now toxic high levels of soy protein - flavored with MSG or preserved by nitrates]; and post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD where I have episodes of cowering, great fear, crying, covering my head with my arms, and screaming "don't hurt me" because of previous beating by police while restrained during unlawful arrests, one of which produced during an asthma attack with respiratory arrest and then unconsciousness when I thought I was dying, but which high ranking officers and incompetent doctors convincing the low ranking troops and jail paramedics maliciously that I was "faking medical problems". By the grace of God, and with the help one time of Sgt. Queen, when I briefly stopped breathing, I am alive.
I was in a lot of pain, great terror, and unable to stand due to dehydration when transferred to Dwight in January 2008. Officers purposely sent me to Dwight in a squad car and not the bus so that they could forget to send my medical records and instead send a message that I was faking all medical problems and a mental case, so that I would be harassed and abused on arrival at Dwight.
On arrival at Dwight I was told to get out of the squad car with thin clothing on a cold snowy day and walk a block to the intake center. I, of course was unable to and fell to the ground in the snow. They yelled at me to walk for at least 15 minutes and eventually after I was turning blue in my legs and hands got a wheelchair. By then the cold had induced an asthma attack and they told intake I was faking. This situation in conjunction with my extremely poor dehydrated physical condition induced an episode of brief unconsciousness. I tried to prevent it by saying I had to put my head down and lie down.
So the sadistic guards forced me violently to stay sitting up in the wheelchair and took me to the psychiatry assistants for mental health screening. I slid myself onto the floor because I was blacking out. A "nurse" came in and found I was waking up and breathing and told the workers that I was "faking" repeating the defamation from the Cook Count officers who bought me there.
So I was thrown on the psych ward, stripped naked and given only a suicide smock and blanket, with a two inch foam mattress. I was denied toilet paper, toothbrush, toothpaste, towel, washcloth, paper cup, or anything in my cell including my eyeglasses or pen and paper. There was no medical screening, partly because I was in a flashback induced by this abuse thinking I was being attacked by an officer again, crying and refusing to be touched. I cowered in the corner near the radiator trying to warm up my bluish limbs and because I had trouble breathing lying down. The asthma attack slowly subsided and the near frozen limbs warmed up.
Hours later they received a fax from Dr. Baker at Cook County jail, who after the first month at the jail tried to competently provide medical care but this was denied because they wouldn't give me an appropriate diet. The doctors at County Jail have no idea what is in the diets and have almost no control at ordering appropriate medical diets, despite the propaganda espoused by the jail executives. This fax described my medical disorders.
Dr. Shicker, a for profit contract doctor from Wexford Medical Group, a really incompetent group, in my opinion, in that they deny transfer to hospitals when necessary in order to preserve their profits, refused to listen to me describe my medical conditions or order the medications I needed. He prescribed medications which were a danger to me or which I was allergic to. He refused to listen about my dietary needs and prescribed a diet I could not tolerate. My weight dropped a further 20 lbs to 128 lbs and I am 5' 9" - a loss of 26% of body weight in 6 months - I was skin and bones and nearly bedridden with abnormal electrolytes in blood when released. A friend who picked me up took me to an ER where they treated me with 3 liters of fluid and IV electrolytes and said I was in such bad shape I should be admitted, but I went home to care for my dying father and slowly recuperated at home.
I was disciplined with segregation because I didn't stand up and come to the chuck hole at the door to be cuffed (despite the fact at the time I was so ill from dehydration, starvation, diarrhea, and my chronic illnesses, I couldn't even sit up, or get water from the tap in the cell and they denied me my assistive device at the time), in SuperMax like conditions - no phone calls ever while in Dwight, except for once to my attorney which was monitored and not private, so sick I passed out at visits and therefore was unable to talk with my attorney and they refused to allow the attorney to come to my cell in the medical unit. If you are not well enough to go to the visiting area you are denied attorney visits. This is unconstitutional.
It is very unpleasant for example to be innocent, wrongfully imprisoned, and punished for refusing to walk (when one is unable to walk due to a disability) and then forced to lay naked other than in a segregation smock for days in my diarrhea, with no TP, no soap, towel or washcloth, no underwear or diaper, because I was too weak to get up to the toilet and too dehydrated because I could not get up to the sink in the cell. All the time the prison officials and guards who stating I was malingering and faking my medical disorders.
When I had a serious allergic response to the food and went into respiratory failure requiring quick response by one of the few nurses who are competent and by the grace of God was on duty that day, with massive fluid infusion, IV steroids, injected epinephrine, oxygen, and other measures to save me, the medical unit director, not a four-year trained nurse, paramedic or doctor, but an incompetent LPN named Ms. Helen Franklin incompetently in an act of malpractice ordered my food pureed.
That's like giving a person who is allergic to peanuts, peanut butter and saying that solves their allergy problem. Therefore, I didn't eat. Eating was like Russian Roulette. I made many grievances and requested a list of ingredients in the food and this was denied. I had to sue the state in an injunction action when released to find ingredients for the food so I could determine what I was allergic to. I discovered the prison diet included toxic levels of soy protein. Even the bread flour used to make bread and donuts is made of soy. All meats of fake and made of soy. The amount of soy is 5+ times that in Japanese diets. Too much of any good thing can actually be toxic, just like too much salt is toxic. Read about toxic levels of soy here.
Of course I presume they must have paid the usual 10% bribe to the state agents or they wouldn't have the contract - and they must show that they are saving money by not transferring inmates to hospitals or they won't keep the contract. (10% of their compensation is paid as a bribe to a political fund like "Friends of Madigan" or "Friends of Blagojevic" which is the standard method in IL of paying bribes for contracts - and ends up funding campaigns for the corrupt - and also being diverted from one campaign fund to another, etc.)
There is so much more that the public is blind to, but this story is long enough - you get the picture!
For more information about torture in prison read here.
Also go to Senator Jim Webb's site here and he has many links about his very noble efforts at reform of the justice system which I hope will be productive. Please support these efforts.
For more commentary see here about vastly under trained and abusive correctional officers here at largest jail in U.S.