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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781949454000 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Science Literacy Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2019 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 490 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
WHAT PROMPTED THE COVERT INVESTIGATION?
It was a sudden lockdown. I had just self-surrendered to the prison a week prior. Everything happening before my eyes was a new experience. Later that evening, I learned the cause for the lockdown. A 75-year-old man had escaped the North Prison Camp at Lompoc; he was driven off the site by his family. This elderly man with a heart condition had had heart attacks while in custody. He had been asking for medical help but received little. A prisoner told me that he would be caught and brought back and locked up in higher security and his sentence will be prolonged. Other prisoners told me that he would probably be transferred to low security from his current minimum security when he was caught and brought back, but in the words of one prisoner "at least he will be able to see a doctor before they catch up to him. He has nothing to lose by escaping; he is 75, he is going to die in prison anyway."
It has now been three months since I surrendered to the prison camp at Lompoc. I have just finished writing my book, Guilty at Gunpoint: How the Government Framed Me, which is my personal story describing how I was sent to prison, thanks to "a coterie of vicious and unethical prosecutors harbored within and enabled by now ironically named the Department of Justice" (words of law ethics professor William Hodes.) I intend to spend the rest of my time in prison conducting my investigation and putting pieces of the puzzle together to complete this book, Prison Torture in America: Shocking Tales from the Inside.
When I heard the story of this 75-year-old man, it rang a bell about my own Health Screening Intake at the prison clinic on June 22, two days after I arrived here. I saw the prison physician, Jaspal Dhaliwal. He spent 30 minutes with me in his office of which he spent 28 minutes putting data into the computer. I thought he was putting information related to my health into the computer, but then I wondered what he could be typing on the keypad for such a long time if he had not taken a moment of his time to take my medical history or conduct a physical exam on me. Having been a physician myself for decades, I knew something was wrong. He spent the remaining two minutes taking my blood pressure and weight without making any eye contact, and he took my blood pressure with the wrong size cuff. My guess is that Dhaliwal probably used the same cuff on every patient. A cuff, as you know, is what a physician wraps around your upper arm to measure your blood pressure, and the size of the cuff has to match the patient size to get an accurate reading. For obvious reasons, the sphygmomanometer was showing erroneous systolic and diastolic blood pressure, numbers due to the very large size of the cuff he was using on my relatively small arm. He asked what my usual blood pressure was. I told him that my blood pressure was always normal, generally in the 118/76 range and I believe he recorded a number into his computer that reflected what I told him. He apparently knew that I was a physician because he asked me what my specialty was.
When I sensed that he was not interested in taking my medical history, I unilaterally started giving him history of my medical condition as he punched away some mysterious data into his computer. His response to the verbalization of my medical condition was simply to ignore me. He continued with his electronic paperwork. Following is a short one-sided conversation I had with him when he finally turned his attention to me two minutes before my departure from his office.
I repeated: "I hope you have had a chance to look at my medical records that were sent to you two weeks prior to my surrender? The Acknowledgment Receipt of my medical records was confirmed by the Bureau of Prisons with its signature on the Return Receipt Green Acknowledgment Card." I informed him that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) also confirmed with my attorney in a phone call that they had received my medical records. His response was still the same silence, ignoring me as though I had not spoken at all. He continued to do his little computer-related chores in-between taking my blood pressure and weight.
I stated, "My medical records contain a letter from my medical examiner, a physiatrist [a physician who specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation], describing what I need for continued rehabilitation in prison and a list of medications that I am currently on. Have you had a chance to review the medical examiner's report? I suffer from myelopathy, thoracic outlet syndrome, and partial paralysis of my right arm and hand." Dhaliwal ignored me again and kept looking at something on his large screen desktop computer.
He finally turned around and looked me in the eye for only a flick of a second and then gave me a derisive smirk. This was when I knew that he had not reviewed my medical records, nor did he intend to. But I did not stop talking and continued to unilaterally give him my history of illness. I was a physician and thought I could make his job easier by giving him a synopsis of my medical history, especially because he did not seem to be interested in reviewing it himself, which I found a bit odd. I informed him that my physicians had sent several hundred pages of my medical records that explained my right arm and hand paralysis, severe stenosis of my cervical spine, and severe osteoporosis. I told him that I was recommended continued physical rehab and drug therapy because I chose not to take the risk of surgical complications due to my severe osteoporosis in counseling with the two neurosurgeons who took care of me prior to imprisonment. He did not say a word and did not remove his face from the computer screen. It was clear to me at this moment that the data he continued to punch into that computer could not possibly have been anything directly related to my medical history. I had no way of knowing as to why exactly he was spending so much time on the computer during my medical visit at his office.
As I got up to leave, I tried my luck again in asking him if I could at least continue to get my medications as requested by my medical examiner, and I repeated the list of my six current medications, to which he replied, "I will give you metformin. We do not have your other medications. I will give you a substitute for the rest." He proceeded, "Well, you have to pay for your sins." Then he started telling me a story about his nephew who was criminally charged for IRS fraud and sentenced to jail for nine years. I was not paying attention to his story. He followed me to the door on my way out and yelled, "next," to the patients in the waiting room.
I will skip for now the gory details of how my own healthcare was handled at the prison. Instead I will focus on what prompted me to start conducting a covert investigation into what was going on inside the prison with regard to the sickest of all people that I have ever seen in my twenty-year career as a physician primarily handling emergency medical situations. The investigative and research skills I had developed as a scientist, researcher, freelance journalist, and author were to come in handy at the strangest of all times and places in my life. What I was about to discover in prison is so valuable that an investigative journalist would pay out of his pocket to have the privilege to go to a low-security prison to have access to the kind of information that I was able to access, except that our government would never afford any journalist such a luxury. Gleaning this information from the jail was not easy, however. It was not without risk — a risk to my own life and the lives of many others who cooperated with me in this undercover operation.
The morning after the 75-year-old escaped the prison, something interesting happened. Two bunks away from me, a man would not wake up, and it was already 7:30 a.m., the time when everyone was required to leave the dorm for work and for the cleaning crew of prisoners to step in. The rule was strict. Everyone must leave the dorm by 7:30 a.m. including those who were severely disabled, in wheelchairs, or ill. My neighboring inmates told me that the man was a type I diabetic and such incidents had occurred before, and at times it had been difficult to wake him up in the mornings. They also informed me that he (the prisoner) regularly went to pill-call line for insulin injections. Prisoners knew by now that I was a physician, so their natural response was to ask if I could help in any way. I tried to shake the patient aggressively and asked him if he had a glucometer. After violent shaking, he woke up, vomited on my green prison uniform shirt and black work-boots, and then pointed to his pillow. Underneath his pillow I found the glucometer and some diabetic supplies. I tested his sugar and it was 448.
The prisoners told me that the pill-call window at the clinic was only open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. I suggested to his neighbors to take him to the clinic right away before the window closed. I did not want to get directly involved with this; I was keeping a low profile to accomplish my own goals that I had set. Prisoners told me that other physician-inmates in the past had been punished for trying to help prisoners. They had been warned that they were not allowed to practice medicine in prison. Two guys, close friends of this diabetic, took him to the clinic in a wheelchair. I told the diabetic inmate to show the nurse at the window the number 448 as it showed on the glucometer screen. I quickly reviewed the previous recordings from days and weeks as he was getting ready to leave the dorm in his wheelchair. The numbers ranged from as low as 20 to as high as 500. (The glucometer does not record numbers above 500 or below 20.) Later in this book, this diabetic prisoner would be one of the prisoners who describes his story in his own words. I also publish some entries from his personal diary and his medical records. But for now, I will continue to discuss the triggers that motivated me to play with fire with others who helped excavate hidden and proscribed documentation from within the four walls of the prison.
Three weeks after this incident, I witnessed an unfortunate event that literally broke my heart. I choke just thinking about it. I had to walk away from writing this and go out for a two-hour walk before feeling emotionally stable enough to come back and start writing again. A 77-year-old inmate, who was an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, a DDS (Doctor of Dental Surgery), and who could barely walk or talk due to his age and debilitating medical conditions, was upset with his correctional counselor and case worker, Ms. T. DuBose. This prisoner, Walter, had gone to her office to file a BP-9 (BP-9 refers to a second-tier complaint to the warden for an Administrative Remedy). I do not know much about what transpired between the prisoner and the counselor, but other prisoners and I witnessed DuBose yelling at the old man because he seemed to have "accused her" of something. I knew this dental surgeon well because he had been talking to me about his health issues that were not being addressed. He had also given me some documentation about his deteriorating health condition during the week preceding this episode. This prisoner was very fragile and could not hear well despite his hearing aids. Sometimes I had to utter words directly in his ears. I guess his age and medical condition might have been the reason I reacted emotionally to the incident because it reminded me of elder abuse for which I am a mandatory reporter as a physician in the outside civilian world.
The next thing many prisoners and I saw was that DuBose had called prison guards on him, and the old man was escorted away from the dormitory toward the offices of the prison officials. Other prisoners told me that the old man was being taken to the hole. I did not know what "the hole" meant. I learned later that in prison language the hole meant solitary confinement. Within half an hour we saw the old man's locker being wheeled to the office of the correction officer (CO) in charge of the dormitory.
We could all see a CO searching the locker in his office item by item. My heart was racing that the CO would find my name on a piece of paper in health-related documents from his locker, which I had traded with him. If they found my name on any documents recovered from his locker, I would have been in serious trouble. I feared less going into solitary confinement and feared more that I would then not be able to continue this investigation, which I had just begun, losing an opportunity of a lifetime to divulge to the world some things that were kept secret from the American people by the FBOP. All I can say is that I got lucky that day.
Perhaps the CO did not carefully read every document recovered from the old man's locker. It was also comforting to know that many of these prison guards (COs) could not read or write very well, which could only work to my advantage in such risky situations. Perhaps the CO (correction officer and prison guards are synonymous terms) did not suspect any underhanded activity due to the inmate's old age and poor health condition. I continued to be lucky after this episode, perhaps because I started to take extraordinary precautions by devising techniques that made my activities difficult to detect both by guards and snitches (an informer in prison language) in prison from that moment on.
Walter told me that he had a severe form of sarcoidosis in his lungs and airways. He had been asking the doctor at the prison to recommend a transfer to Taft Prison Camp where it was hot and dry; the ocean moisture and cold temperature at Lompoc was making it very hard for him to breathe. He told me that living in a hot climate was one of the main treatments of his disease to help prevent progression to its severest and terminal form. This is a fact about sarcoidosis of the lungs that I recognized myself as a physician. The prison doctor had denied his BP-8s (the inmate's informal complaints to staff) and he was planning to file a tier level-2 formal complaint called a BP9, which was meant to be directed to the attention of the prison warden. Walter had informed me that his case worker, DuBose, had scratched off her hours posted on her office door (which I verified myself to be true) and that he was frustrated in repeatedly making trips to her office to submit his BP-9 paperwork and finding her office door always locked.
Walter was old and very frail and could barely walk or talk, probably the slowest walking prisoner in the camp. On the other hand, DuBose, who was also my caseworker, weighed about 300 pounds and was all muscle and very intimidating to many, especially to the white-collar criminals. The rumor was that prisoners who were assigned to her better not ask any questions if they went to her office. A prisoner's question will not be answered nine out of ten times, and asking the same question three times would be grounds for the solitary confinement. In my limited experience with her, there was much truth to what prisoners said about her. I knew that I had to be very cautious about asking any questions at all, and if I did, I was better off limiting my questions to one or two and to be extremely polite and sound apologetic with every word I uttered to this living, breathing, female linebacker.
The day after I saw the old man, Walter, being escorted away from the camp, many prisoners told me that he was taken to the hole. As a general rule, there was no way for me to verify that personally. Violating prison policy — and anything a prisoner does that the prison guard or the prison staff does not like is a violation of policy, or a security threat or security matter — was grounds for you to be transferred to a solitary cell.
Many prisoners described solitary confinement, called the hole, also called SHU (Special Housing Unit) as essentially a room the size of a parking lot booth with very little light coming in. This little booth has a narrow see-through slit of a window well above the level of a person's head. There were prisoners who were taken away to a solitary cell and then eventually returned after serving one to six months in solitary confinement. I had the opportunity to interview them independently to verify facts about the SHU living conditions. They all told me that the one-hour daily release from the cell for exercise afforded to them by federal law was not accorded to them. I have reason to believe that to be true because the consistent reports about the SHU that were given to me were by prisoners who belonged to different prison gangs and some white-collar criminals who did not associate with one another. So they could not have conspired to deliberately give me false information. All reports from these prisoners were independent reports, not interconnected, and therefore likely very accurate.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Prison Torture in America"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Paul Singh.
Excerpted by permission of Science Literacy Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Section I: Introduction
- What Prompted the Covert Investigation?
- Planning an Undercover Operation
Section II: The Trail of Tears
- Bleeding from Cancer for Five Years: The Testimony of Pete
- On the Brink of Dialysis: The Story of Noah
- Living with Prostate Cancer: Liam’s Testimony
- Stroke, Heart Attack, Epilepsy & Blindness: The Story of Mason
- In a Diabetic Coma: The Testimony of Jacob
- The Man Who Lost His Foot: The Testimony of Elijah
- The Man Who Lost His Lower Limb: The Testimony of Joseph
- Torment in Hellfire: Living with Suicidal Itch for One year
- From a Nine-Foot Hole to “the Hole”: The Testimony of a 77-year-old Inmate
- A Broken Hip Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: The Story of Arthur
- Help will Come if You Could Prove You’ll Die: Affidavit of a 62-year-old Inmate
- The Hush-Hush Business of a Broken Spinal Injury: Testimony of Grey
- Job’s Disease – A Biblical Curse – A Punishment Well Deserved
- Truth Out from Under the Rock: In Real Time
- My Diesel Tour: The Testimony of Eason
Section III: Reminiscent of War Crimes
- Manufacturing Medical Records
- Sisyphean Remedies
- The Sick-Call Scam
- Withholding Life-Saving Medications
- Medical Cruelty, Emotional Violence, and Deadly Neglect
- Care Providers from Hell Trained to Torture
- Eavesdropping at the Pill-Call Line
- Prison Culture: The Government’s Perspective
Section IV: Legal Considerations and Case Law
- The First Civil Rights Action: Estelle v. Gamble
- Eighth Amendment Violations: Court Cases of Cruel and Unusual Punishment
- Deliberate Indifference: Court Verdicts
- Best Advice for Civil Liberties and Public Service Attorneys and Human Rights Groups
- §516.29 Federal Statutes and Regulations
- Qualified and Absolute Immunities and the Government’s Common Defense
Section V: Conclusion
Inmates’ Consent
Acknowledgments and Gratitude
Resources and Credits
Customer Reviews
