…and they don’t have their prescription medication on them? How do prescribed medications work once someone is sentenced? Does a prison doctor get their records and just continue from there or start with a new assessment? What would happen in the case of medical marijuana?
They will receive mediocre, cut rate medical care that may or may not kill them. If they are lucky, new prescriptions will be written by doctors/PAs employed by the jail or prison. If they aren’t lucky - the correctional health groups are reluctant to prescribe narcotics or lifesaving drugs that are expensive - they won’t get their drugs and they die. Happens all the time. The jail/prison medical providers cover their ass with reams of legal documents that essentially are a series of boilerplate lies that deny all responsibility for anything, and plaintiff’s attorneys have plenty of medical malpractice cases to keep them busy with more sympathetic plaintiffs than prisoners.
I can provide lots of links if anyone questions my observations of fundamental reality.
Oh, and medicale marijuana? Not happening. Even if it’s keeping them from screaming and clawing at the walls in pain/vomiting all over the floor, no prison/jail provider would ever write a script for it. They’ll just let the prisoner scream til and mop the cell out after. Maybe put the prisoner in solitary for their “bad behavior” for screaming in pain all night.
[QUOTE=Habeed]
I can provide lots of links if anyone questions my observations of fundamental reality.
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Please do. The last thing most systems want is some arrestee expiring because he was suddenly removed from his beta blockers.
To answer your question, the exact rules and procedures will vary by juridiction and indeed within different systems of the small juridiction. In my juridiction, the names of prescription drugs being taken is one of the things the arresting officer or constable is supposed to ask when the person is being processed and while they will want a prescription they will always allow a person to continue taking it, although usually they will keep it and hand out as necessary. For example, if a person is supposed to take the meds at meal time, they will give it then.
This is for judicial lockups and station houses. For prisons, they will have a detailed medical history at time of incarceration and the infirmary will have its own rules.
Paging Dr Mercotan!
Guy who worked for me got arrested for traffic offences while driving a couple of years ago and was hauled off to jail (which is different than prison). He was on medication - I think blood pressure, statins, something like that. His mother took his meds to the jail and I imagine they were then dispensed by staff there.
After sentencing/prison, I don’t know. Michigan, if there are differences in how states handle it.
Here’s a Cracked.com article describing how fun being in a women’s prison can be. The number one list item talks about the lack of decent medical care.
A very good friend of mine just got out of county after serving 6 months. While in jail she was having trouble sleeping and was given Trazodone to help her sleep. She had a kidney stone while in jail, and was taken to the hospital, and prescribed Vicodin for pain for as long as she needed it. She was also allowed to have her anti-anxiety medication while there.
25 years on a large Sheriffs office, about 2 working in the jail.
Meds brought to the jail, whether by mom or anyone else, are not going to be dispensed to inmate. Period. DO NOT come to the jail trying to give any form of drug to the visitation deputy. I can recall stories where that is a very bad idea.Even if they are over the counter meds your day could be quite ruined by this stupid act. The only thing that will be accepted for an inmate is a change of clothes for court. And those are kept in a secure area until the inmate is transferred to the court staging area the day of his/her appearance.
Care is taken by medical staff to confirm that the inmate was prescribed certain meds and they will be dispensed by the jail pharmacy and ONLY the jail pharmacy. I don’t care who your doctor is, the meds he sends will not get in.
I knew of no inmate that was allowed to take any form of narcotic while in a pod. If they were in such pain that it absolutely required it they were transported to a secure hospital room.
Of course, YMMV.
[weakly] Ta-da…
I just googled these words: lack of insulin in jail
Got more than 10 million hits. The first page lists numerous stories of people dying in jail because they didn’t get their insulin (at least several of those stories seem to refer to the same case in Texas); also stories about states or counties paying out million-dollar settlements, and stories about states or counties trying to disavow liability. All the stuff you’d expect to find. And lots of it.
This didn’t happen here. The nurses came around to each pod 4-5 times in a 24 hour span. Inmates, including those unsentenced or just awaiting bail, were allowed to check their blood sugar and were given whatever amount of insulin they needed.
Sorry. I’m not sure what this means.
It’s an Arrested Development reference. [SPOILER]After being stabbed while attempting to break out of prison as part of a magic act, G.O.B. Bluth wakes up in an unfamiliar bed:
[/SPOILER]
OK, I’m speaking as a primary care doc who did 15 years in the private sector (where my career included Peer Review and Risk Management), and now has done 13 years in the public sector working overseeing prison healthcare.
First, jails are different from prison. And every jail is different, and run by the local county sheriff. Availability of health care and meds varies wildly from one to another. Some allow the family to bring in any meds which have legitimately been prescribed to the detainee, others only give what their physician/nurse practitioner deems necessary.
Once the inmate gets to my system’s intake prison (which as a rule requires a conviction for a felony plus a sentence of over 1 year), they are seen by an RN the same day, and any meds they were taking at the jail are generally continued until they are seen by a practitioner. At that first meeting with the practitioner, their medical needs are determined and the meds may be changed, discontinued, added to, or all of the above.
We don’t like bad outcomes in prison. EVERY death in prison must be reviewed by a team at the site, by the system’s overall medical director, and by a panel of both prison personnel and outside experts. So, 3 reports, all of which make critiques and suggested actions, with the final report with outside experts being given most weight. Once that data is in, we try to make meaningful change to our health care delivery system.
I’ve cared for rich folks with great insurance, the homeless who had no money, and everything in between. I can say that the prison system in my state does a very good job of matching the necessary medical care delivery of the best insurance systems, and certainly provides far, far better care than those lacking resources get. Our HIV patients are seen by immunologists, our cancer patients get community standard of care chemo/rad therapy, knees and hips get replaced when it’s deemed necessary, cardiac procedures and kidney transplants occur too.
What makes so many of my patients upset is that we don’t treat things which don’t need intervention. Unfortunately they perceive things differently. Every back pain or headache seems to merit narcotics to many of them, every sore knee after playing ball must have an MRI. After all, their family doctor ‘on the outside’ would have given that to them.
No system is perfect, and we don’t always do everything right. Limited funding makes it tough to see everyone in a timely fashion. Indifferent guards who don’t report serious illness, patients who lie thru their teeth about their symptoms, nurses who hear the same complaint from the same patient 99 times before and it always turns out to be nothing until the 100th time all add to the complexity and difficulty of taking care of an incarcerated patient population. And people do die suddenly and unexpectedly, of previously undiagnosed critical coronary blockages, ruptured aneurysms, etc. And sometimes we just miss things we should have seen, the last time we looked. But that’s true of all of medicine, not just Corrections Medicine.
I’ll step off my soapbox now.
I’m a pharmacist and have worked at places that had contracts with local jails, and also been responsible for the care of inmates who were hospitalized. Around here, if they need a controlled substance (phenobarbital would be a very common one), they are admitted to the hospital until an alternative can be found, and hospitalized inmates always have security, usually one officer in the room and one in the hall.
For me, the saddest thing was filling RXs for the women’s wing, because so many of them were obviously pregnant. 
At the very least, they will receive basic medical care, which includes injectable medications if they need them.
I can confirm what Qadgop wrote (having worked in a different state system). Every prisoner will get all necessary medical care (which includes dental care, mental health care, and free eyeglasses or other prosthetic devices) at no cost to the prisoner.
But as Qadgop also wrote, some people feel their interpretation of what is necessary care is not being addressed.
When a person enters prison they will be interviewed by medical staff. They will be asked about their medical history, any health problems they have, and any prescriptions. If they have an active prescription it will be reviewed by a doctor and, if he agrees with the prescription, he will issue it. The medication will usually be held in the medical unit and the prisoner will report once a day (or whatever his schedule is) to receive his meds.
Prisoners will not be denied a needed prescription or procedure because of the cost. I saw some of the bills - there were individuals receiving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care.
As Qadgop said, it’s not a prefect system. But there are millions of people living outside of prison who don’t have health care as good as prisoners have.
One thing an inmate is not going to get in jail, at least here in Milwaukee County, is anything special for withdrawals. Alcohol and opiate withdrawal is some nasty shit to watch and I presume even nastier to go through. But all you’ll get for it is a standard dose of Tylenol. Nothing more. No other treatment for it. No Suboxone. No methadone. No therapy. Nothing. At least not here.
Don’t like it? Don’t come to jail!
Sorry, PK but that’s not true. I personally know 3 of the previous MKE county jail medical directors, have seen the MKE jail medical withdrawal protocols, and have seen the medical transfer paperwork that comes out of MKE Co Jail on literally a thousand or so patients in the past decade. Alcohol withdrawal is certainly treated, because alcohol withdrawal is life-threatening. To fail to treat it when indicated would be such a breach of standard of medical care that it’d be indefensible.
Opioid withdrawal is not life-threatening, but the jail has a protocol for that. I just suspect it’s not used quite nearly so much.
This is a very common reason for admitting inmates to a hospital. Withdrawal can be FATAL if not properly managed.
If they are transferred they are no long IN the jail. They’re still in custody but not in the facility itself.
While in a pod I knew of no time that special meds were given for the condition. Both alcohol and opiate withdrawals were monitored, but I recall few that were removed and transferred for it. 1000 inmates over 10 years for CJF is nothing compared to the amount of addicts that were held over that time.
Only caveat to your claim is that I was only in the jail for 2 of my 25 years, and I retired in 2007. Things could have changed since then.
Their medical transfer paperwork lists the meds they’d been receiving in the MKE Co. Jail. And I’ve seen inmates coming from there who were on benzos for alcohol withdrawal while at MKE Co. Jail. It’s standard of care, to not do it would open them to multi-million dollar lawsuits. And be inconsistent with National Commission on Correctional Health Care’s standards for jails.