Flintsylvania

I sat in a federal courtroom in Scranton, Pennsylvania for 3 days last December listening to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) attempt to justify its failure to treat Mumia Abu-Jamal and the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 people (their numbers) in the prison system who have Hepatitis C. They admitted to treating only 5 Inmates for a disease which can be fatal if left untreated. Mumia Abu-Jamal almost died in early 2015 from what turned out to be complications of Hepatitis C. His attempts to be treated in the prison infirmary went nowhere until he collapsed into unconsciousness, and it was discovered that his blood sugar level was almost 600.

If not for the national and international support for his status as an innocent political prisoner framed by the Philadelphia political establishment, he would probably be dead by now. One wonders how many inmates have died in Pennsylvania Prisons as the result of the capitalist obsession with privatizing everything in sight and leaving the unfortunate victims of mass incarceration at the mercy of a for-profit system.

Prison Health Services and Corizon Health, Inc. merged in 2011 to form the largest privately held provider of healthcare to the nation’s prison population. The corporation has come under increasing criticism and scrutiny and has lost contracts in Minnesota, New York, Florida, Maine, Tennessee and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, among others for abysmal health care. Corizon provides medical services to inmates in Pennsylvania state prisons. The ACLU National Prison Project has criticized Corizon stating: “When you combine the profit motive with limited oversight and an unpopular, politically powerless group like prisoners, it’s a recipe for bad outcomes.”

The parties disagreed at the hearing over when treatment for Hepatitis C is necessary. The Commonwealth wants to wait until the inmate has cirrhosis of the liver and/or esophageal varices (hemorrhaging of the throat) before offering the new medications that have a 90-95% cure rate. This rather short sighted approach is astounding when you consider that treatment at that point will undoubtedly be far more costly than providing the treatment at an earlier stage…not to mention the unnecessary torture experienced by the inmate when leaving the cure to the final stages of the disease. It sounds “cruel and unusual“ to me.

The pharmaceutical companies are at fault too. They charge $1000.00 per pill. Thus a 12-week treatment costs about $85,000. However, the Commonwealth reportedly spent approximately $140,000 for Abu-Jamal’s one week hospital stay. It is obvious that the Commonwealth will save money in the long run by treating Hepatitis C early in the disease process to avoid more expensive complications later. Also, In view of the numbers involved, Pennsylvania should be able to negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost. Gilead Sciences, which produces the medication, negotiated a 99% discount with Egypt so that the treatment costs only $900.00 per patient. In Egypt, according to The New York Times, 50% of adult men suffer from Hepatitis C.

In a social democracy, caring for the 50,000 people serving sentences in Pennsylvania might be seen as an opportunity to improve the public health through treatment while incarcerated that they might not be able to receive on the outside. After all, most of the 10,000 people testing positive for hepatitis C will be leaving the prison system and undoubtedly spreading the disease if untreated to their associates. But in our capitalist democracy the focus is on saving money by withholding treatment, not the public good.

According to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the simple definition of the word government is: “the group of people who control and make decisions for a country, state, etc.” An obsolete definition for the word government in the same dictionary is “moral conduct or behavior”. Obsolete it is. Incredibly, the DOC counsel was caught attempting to put false testimony into evidence. The Commonwealth’s witness, Dr. Noel, repudiated a paragraph of a document that had his signature on it, which stated that the measure of the progression of the disease was viral load. The DOC’s argument was that Abu-Jamal’s viral load was not high enough to justify treatment. Dr. Noel further testified that he instructed that the paragraph in question be struck. The counsel for the DOC attempted to claim that its inclusion was a “clerical” error however, Dr. Noel made it clear that he had objected to the paragraph three times. What is worse, a Federal Magistrate apparently relied on the paragraph in denying an earlier temporary injunction.

In Flint, Michigan the decision to take corrosive water from the Flint River rather than glacial Lake Huron was driven by money, not morals. The change in water source, according to Democracy Now, was intended to save 5 million dollars, while the fix will cost 1.5 billion dollars. Flint’s babies were sacrificed on the altar of money. In the Pennsylvania Prison System the administration is consigning thousands of prisoners to the torture of a chronic disease with irreversible liver damage in a wrongheaded approach to saving money.

Martha R. Conley is an attorney and Co-Chair of Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Pittsburgh.

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