Nursing Covid-19 in Prison

01/11/2021 by J. Nelson

Couldn’t care less about “criminal scum”? Then how about one of your heroes – of the frontline healthcare variety?

Among the key findings in a September 2020 report from The Council on Criminal Justice is that COVID-19 infection rates for inmates are four times higher than for the general public. Mortality rates are double. As of last summer, prisons in America accounted for 19 of the top 20 clusters of confirmed Coronavirus cases in the United States.

For real time California numbers, check out the Los Angeles Times’ Coronavirus tracker, currently providing updates of cumulative cases, new cases, and deaths by day.

As one who envisions the redirection of adult offenders rather than the mere recycling of them, I urge you to absorb the statistics, detention hotspots, and death counts while imagining the heart and hope that is suspended amidst the ongoing disqualification of those in custody.

The world is a place where nothing is guaranteed, clearly. But since prison is a smaller, simpler microcosm of society, the loss of goal-oriented trajectories, guidance, and rewards in custody is intensified. For many prisoners and detainees with hampered coping skills and emotional and self-management challenges, there are little or no real diversions as exist elsewhere. Coronavirus kills these aspirational programs even quicker than people as infection safeguards are enacted.

Adding insult to injury is what I call bonus justice, by which the incarcerated are treated as eligible for additional hardship and dismay just because, “You’re here, aren’t you?”

But maybe you see the incarcerated as “criminal scum,” and these things don’t offend your humanity. Fine. How ’bout healthcare workers? You like frontline heroes? Think they’re worth something? Then let’s talk about a prison nurse, one who’s been a friend of mine for years.

This particular nurse earned her credentials with the tenacity and dedication of an astronaut in training. I remember her long hours and that pain-in-the-ass car in which her commute was endured. I was surprised when she announced just over a year ago that she’d accepted a nursing position in a men’s prison, and I admire her for putting need above judgment.

At present, my friend is facing the risk of COVID-19 transmission every single day, and she does so in an atmosphere of fiercely elevated environmental, personal, and psychological vigilance. The emotional and cognitive burden she carries would simply snap many of the rest of us — and that’s without Coronavirus-related fears. Prison is a minefield of rules to remember, and protocols are substituted as abruptly as security requires. Sure, my friend can leave each night, but she’s no less subjected to the righteousness of an amped-up military chain-of-command than are the badges and bad guys. How “at home” could she be with barbed wire, gate buzzers and barking men in her head?

Additionally, as citizens, we use our values and principles to judge each other, with courtesy and manners acting as referees. On the prison yard, philosophies and integrity just square off. In the aftermath, it’s up to whoever’s left standing to pester someone behind a fortified walk-up window for a band-aid. Meanwhile the dread and the aggressive energy of gang ideation never lets up. The cartoonish yet unfunny macho posturing is woven into her work-language, as are minute-to-minute suspicions and charity-killing levels of bureaucracy.

On an average day, this is just some of what my nurse friend has to shake off during her (long) drives home. Now she has the danger of bringing COVID home with her, too. How many of these tensions have morphed, I wonder, into corrosive strains of their own by the time she pulls into the driveway?

There have been 139 reported Coronavirus deaths among prison staff, but since testing information is sporadic and not all states release info on prison employees tested for COVID-19 – these critical frontline workers are forced to speculate, trade rumors, and hope they’re being given the straight story. In that way, at least, they’re just like inmates they serve.

“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies,”

UPDATE:

Los Angeles Times front page – January 13th, 2021:
“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies…”

“Freedom” 2020 Excuse of the Year

12/09/2020 by J. Nelson

Of all the con jobs we’ve witnessed this year, “freedom,” as both a behavioral exemption and grounds for radicalization, is by far the most repulsive.

From rationalizing hysterical self-centeredness to racism, betrayal, co-signing cowardice, gas-lighting, and willful ignorance, 2020 offered too many candidates for this decision to have come easily.

Oceans of petulant finger-pointers, neo-Nazis, and applauders of malice (on both sides) gave us a perfect storm; a Category 5 from which Americans sought moral shelter in those crude dwellings of justification. Welcome to the shantytown.

Which shack appeared the least structurally sound? Or so went my criteria, until the examples of our taking freedom for granted simply flooded the competition. Take this one, for instance:

The Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA) survey of 2,000 members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) showed that 55% of participants said they would not bother to get inoculated.
ABC News – 12/7/2020

Call me crazy, but don’t NYC’s first responders have arguably the best health care options in the United States? Isn’t their not wanting “to be looked at as test subjects” just a tad spoiled? How is this not like Trump refusing to wear a mask with the assurance of top-notch medical treatment?

“As a union,” says Andrew Ansbro, president of the UFA, “we are defending the right to make that choice.” Defending it from what, suspicion? Responsibility? This is the heroism we’re constantly told to revere?

Elsewhere, California governor Gavin Newsom and other suits – whose failures to practice Coronavirus safety protocols seemingly put them above their own decrees – have the “freedom” to be two-faced while they kiss my ass.

Likewise, the “freedom” not to wear a mask despite their proven ability to help protect others from our personal respiratory exhaust is not self-government. It’s a selfish distortion of independence.

Refusing to refer to Joe Biden & Kamala Harris as “President and Vice President Elect” is the “freedom” to show disdain for leadership and professionalism. It’s choosing to exhibit bad sportsmanship before the eyes of young people. It leaves adherents in the self-righteous and phony position of telling others to respect them and their institutions rather than demonstrating why.

I myself am a fan of comedians Doug Stanhope and Dave Chappelle, but both could stand to realize that “freedom” from the boogeyman of political correctness isn’t found in belittling gender identity. Instead of re-purposing “faggot” as a comedic garnish could you maybe free your progressive audience from second guessing you?

Showing hatred toward those of different cultures or expressing immigrant xenophobia ––and calling it patriotism–– is “freedom” as well. So is beating your dog with a stick and calling it “correcting”.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with shooting and killing two people during a civil disturbance in Wisconsin (itself the exercise of varying degrees of “freedom”), went looking for a fight, yet some call him a patriot for allegedly defending the “freedom” of entitled others. Either way, Rittenhouse’s own “freedom” will likely go as far as OJ Simpson’s, in that he’ll never be anything other than a murderer too young to legally purchase a gun, who traded a trigger for his own narrative.

As 2020 drags to a close, it’s high time we drop “freedom” from the all-time American short list of excuses for bad behavior. In too many ways, we’ve already lost the “freedom” of a last laugh.

Life in a Prison Classroom

03/29/2016 by J. Nelson

I know life in a prison classroom, and the learning environment you may or may not find once you’ve taken a seat.

A brief click-through of “5 Projects to Watch in 2016” from Correctional News leaves me wondering how much prison officials really know about the obstacles inmates face just getting through a detention facility’s classroom door. What does it matter, you ask? Well, in an era where words like “reform,” “rehabilitation,” and “recidivism” are on everyone’s lips, it’s important to know when a component as critical as education is simply being given lip service.

Correctional News covers prison operations, design, and construction. It celebrates grand openings and groundbreakings because imminent completion dates tend to matter to rubber mattress merchants, vendors of detection products, and shower flooring suppliers.

Currently showcased are the East County Detention Center near Palm Springs, for example, which is set to open in 2017, the Kern County justice facility in Bakersfield, and the new Utah State Prison, among others. California being where I paid my debt to society, I tend to monitor its prison system more closely than I do others. But all of these entries have something in common, and that’s my point: they feature anemic descriptions of the education facilities also under construction. Rehabilitation-as-footnote here, will eventually make corrections administrators and state officials look as though they’re simply hanging wreaths of rehabilitation on freshly painted classroom doors and leaving it at that. Read more