Feds find new abuses at jail,
Click Here: http://www.buffalonews.com/city/communities/erie-county/article84682.ece
refile complaint, County leaders face inmate issues again
By Matthew Spina, NEWS STAFF REPORTER,
Published:July 29 2010, 12:00 AM
Updated: July 29, 2010, 6:06 PM
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Consider these new stories from the U. S. Justice Department:
• Erie County Holding Center medical personnel failed to give an inmate one of her blood-pressure medicines. She suffered a stroke and died months later.
• Correctional facility personnel misdiagnosed an inmate’s skin problem as a spider bite. It turned out to be a drug-resistant bacterial infection.
• Deputies struck a Holding Center inmate in the face while pulling him from his cell for a court appearance. His cornea was scratched.
The Justice Department, after arguments from County Attorney Cheryl A. Green, days ago rewrote and refiled its legal complaint against the top county officials who run the county’s jails.
The amended complaint still alleges that county leaders, including County Executive Chris Collins and Sheriff Timothy B. Howard, fail to protect inmate rights. But this new version includes stories about neglect and abuse not contained in the Justice Department’s initial landmark report on county jail conditions in July 2009. That’s because too little was known about those events, or they had yet to occur.
This time, the lawyers referred to the case of Bonita Bolden. Bolden —who was not named in the complaint — suffered two broken ribs and a collapsed lung in a struggle with Holding Center deputies just days before the 2005 elections, when Howard stood for a four-year term. The event became publicly known only in October 2009, when reported in The Buffalo News.
The amended complaint refers to the Holding Center’s refusal this April to call an ambulance for wounded inmate Tony Martin, whose jaw and orbital eye socket were broken when other inmates jumped him. The county’s top medical officer said that it was fine to drive Martin to a hospital in a patrol car, since his injuries had been stabilized. However, the event also backed up Justice Department claims that jail personnel do not protect inmates from attack.
The complaint alleges that Collins, Howard and the other county-employed defendants fail to train, supervise and discipline their employees and “knew or should have known that their policies and/or practices were, and continue to be, deficient enough to result in constitutional violations.” After a ruling by U. S. District Judge William M. Skretny, the Justice Department must connect the high-ranking defendants to wrongdoing by front-line personnel.
Green has yet to answer the complaint, but she has doubted many of the past allegations of inmate abuse as recited by Justice Department lawyers. She has insisted that the county’s top officials have established policies to run a safe jail system and has said the defendants are not liable for isolated wrongdoing by front-line workers.
The Justice Department says that it only wants Erie County to “ensure lawful conditions of confinement are afforded to inmates” in the areas of medical care, mental health care, sanitation and protection from the harms that are delivered by both the staff and other inmates.
In recent weeks, the county attorney and Justice Department lawyers have opted to negotiate rather that litigate jail improvements. In their first attempt, they sealed a historic agreement calling for improvements in suicide prevention. Holding Center personnel must make cell fixtures less likely to support a noose and install a range of new operating safeguards.
Last week, the sheriff filled a new Holding Center post required by the settlement—deputy superintendent for compliance. The new official will ensure implementation of the suicide- prevention measures. To fill the job, Howard reached into the jail bureaucracy and promoted the Holding Center’s chief of operations, Michael F. Reardon, raising his base salary by about $18,000 a year. Some county lawmakers and others familiar with the jail system reasoned that Howard should have selected an outsider.
“A new broom sweeps clean,” said Roger Krieger, who retired as the Erie County Sheriff’s Office’s assistant chief of operations in 1988.
However, aides to both Howard and Green said they needed someone familiar with the busy downtown jail who could hit the ground running.
The new stories of inmate neglect have been culled from lawsuits still winding through the courts. One involves Marguerite Arrindell, who was receiving two medications for her hypertension, Avalide and clonidine, when arrested in April 2008 because she was riding in a car with drug paraphernalia.
Inside the jail, she continued to receive the Avalide but not the clonidine, and her blood pressure was not regularly monitored, according to a legal complaint alleging cruel and unusual punishment. Arrindell, 54, suffered a stroke April 23, 2008, and died in Erie County Medical Center on July 17 of that year.
The case of flesh-eating bacteria involves Gary Bartlomiejczak, a former inmate at the county Correctional Facility in Alden who filed a lawsuit in November 2008 after his case of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, was first considered a spider bite, a common misdiagnosis.
“After many attempts to be seen by a doctor, I was finally seen by one of the overworked nurses who stated that I had a spider bite and later an infection due to an in-grown hair follicle,” Bartlomiejczak said in a letter to The News last year. “Only after one of these lesions burst open did I have a culture done, and then seen by a doctor. During the entire time I remained in general population . . . spreading this virus even further.”
The News was unable to identify the Holding Center inmate whose cornea was scratched in January of this year, the inmate who got his hands on a razor and cut his arms, stomach and neck in January, or the Correctional Facility inmate whose foot required additional surgery in March after his requests for treatment were ignored. All were mentioned in the Justice Department complaint.
County leaders say they have installed major improvements in the jails, especially the Holding Center. It now has medical professionals on duty round-the- clock. Just recently, the county moved to add more medical and mental health staff to the jail, which also has been cleaned and upgraded.
Holding Center deputies, however, say a years-old problem continues. Again in the dog days of summer, they must work up to 72 hours a week, the most allowed under their contract, to meet state-imposed staffing levels. Several deputies, who refuse to be identified for fear of reprisals from higher-ups, say that they are worn out and that jail conditions remain poor and dangerous.
Note: Where is corrective action in Valdosta-Lowndes County Georgia? U. S. Department of Justice after forty-years it seems that you would have investigated our local jail. But then who cares?
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