BEYOND PUNISHMENT - BETTY BRINK

BETTY BRINK INTERVIEWED - BEYOND PUNISHMENT
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BEYOND PUNISHMENT Betty Brink, writer and reporter for the Fort Worth Weekly is the author of Carswell Prison Blues, an article that ran in the Summer 2008 issue of Ms Magazine on medical neglect suffered by the female prison population in that Federal facility. Brink writes of several specific cases including that of Linda Fenton who was found comatose on her cot just 2 days before her release with a sheet wrapped so tightly around her neck it had to be cut off. Although Fenton never regained consciousness, attendants kept her shackled to a gurney until she left the prison hospital in a body bag. Betty Brinks fill us in on the Carswell Prison blues

Prison RAPE

Another Carswell Conviction
A former guard is found guilty of sexually abusing a prisoner.
By Betty Brink
http://www.fwweekly.com/issues/2004-02-18/metropolis.html



Shirley: 'I hope the Miller trial is just the beginning.'
On Feb. 10, former guard Michael Lawrence Miller became the seventh employee of the federal prison camp for women at Carswell to be convicted of sexual abuse of a prisoner in the last seven years.
A jury in U.S. District Judge John McBryde's court that morning convicted Miller of raping Marilyn Shirley, a prisoner in his custody, in March 2000.
The jury of 10 women and two men found him guilty on five counts:
aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse of a ward, abusive sexual contact, abusive sexual contact with a ward, and assault. His are the most serious charges to date to be brought against Carswell's sexual predators. According to the U.S.
Attorney's office, he is facing a sentence of 11 years to life in prison
and a fine as high as $1.25 million.
Prison rights advocates such as Boston law professor Wendy Murphy, who teaches about sexual violence at the New England School of Law, hailed the verdict as a giant step forward on behalf of prison rape victims.
"Indeed, the law should now send a message [through sentencing] that an attack by someone in a position of power against a defenseless person such as Ms. Shirley ... will result in extreme sanctions," she said.
Shirley has already won a $4 million civil judgment against Miller. But her push for justice hasn't stopped with him. Her attorneys have also filed a $10 million civil rights lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, on behalf of Shirley and her family, accusing the agency of failing to protect her from sexual violence while she was in custody.
In the suit, Shirley, 48, alleges that Carswell staff and the bureau were aware of the "high incidence of sexual misconduct [at the prison] by its officers and employees" and should have never allowed a lone male guard to be assigned to Shirley's area of the prison during the 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. shift when the rape took place.
When Fort Worth Weekly first reported in June 2003 on the sexual abuse charges that had been brought against Carswell employees, the reform group Stop Prison Rape called the numbers "alarmingly high" for a single prison.
Since 1997, a chaplain, a physician, a counselor, two guards, a cook, and now Miller have been convicted of sexual crimes against female inmates at the prison. All except Miller claimed that the women prisoners with whom they had sex were willing partners. Those six were charged with "sexual abuse of a ward," and received sentences ranging from 14 months in prison to probation. The doctor's medical license was revoked. Another doctor, who was never criminally charged, was fired after being caught in his office in a sexual act with an inmate patient. None was charged with rape, even though in the eyes of the law any sexual contact between a prisoner and his or her jailer is considered coerced. "There is no such thing as consensual sex in a prison," said a defense attorney here who handled two of the previous Carswell cases.
Federal prisons spokesman Dan Dunne praised the guilty verdict brought against Miller. The bureau, he said, cooperated fully with investigators and prosecutors in pursuing the case. "We have a zero tolerance policy against such [sexual misconduct] behavior in our institutions," he said. "In the rare circumstances when a staff member gets involved in such a situation, we take action." Asked about the large number of sex convictions at Carswell, Dunn said, "One would be too many." Still, he said, the bureau has taken no special look at Carswell. "We are continually looking at the procedures for all our institutions, to prevent sexual assaults," he said.
The 35-year-old Miller, who lives in North Richland Hills, is married with three children. He was a 16-year employee of the Bureau of Prisons with no prior record when he was indicted last year and promptly fired. Since then, he has been working as a cable installer. His sentencing is scheduled for May. According to his attorney, Miller declined to be interviewed for this story.
For Shirley, the verdict was the culmination of a process that began the morning after the assault in March 2000, when she wrapped her semen-stained sweatpants in a plastic bag and taped the bag to the underside of her locker where it stayed, undetected, for the next six months. On the day when she was released from her 18-month sentence for a methamphetamine sale, she reported the rape to the warden and turned over her sweatpants and a pubic hair to the FBI. ("Iron Bars Do Not a Safe Place Make," Fort Worth Weekly, Jan. 30, 2003.) Since that time, she said, "bringing Miller to justice has consumed my life."
But the FBI almost derailed the possibility of a conviction by its sloppy handling of the evidence. For reasons that the agency has never
Explained to Shirley or the Weekly, the hair was lost and the testing for DNA in the semen wasn't done for nearly three years. At the trial, Amrita Lal, an expert from the New Orleans forensic lab to which the pants were eventually sent for testing, testified that the semen samples were badly degraded by the passage of time and from being sealed for so long in plastic. They were also from a donor who had had a vasectomy, which Miller and millions of other men have had; the medical procedure also makes it difficult to find usable DNA. Lal said that only three of the 10 DNA markers she found in the semen matched those from saliva taken from Miller's cheek.
Miller's attorney, James Smith, argued that the DNA samples were not conclusive enough to send a man to prison for life.
The jury apparently sided with prosecutor Fred Schattman, who pointed out the undisputed fact there was semen on Shirley's sweatpants that had to have come from a male inside the prison. Miller had the opportunity, he said, and at least some of the matching DNA.
Unlike most rape victims, Shirley has always allowed her name to be used in published reports of her accusations against Miller. "This was not an isolated crime [in the prison system]," she said. "If I speak out in my own name, it may give other women the courage to come forward and tell their stories of sexual abuse in prison." She became a poster child for prison rape victims when she went to Washington last year to lobby on behalf of a significant prison rape reform bill that was later passed by Congress.
"The only way to stop this crime," she said, "is to expose the rapists and the sexual predators in our prisons, and bring them to justice. I hope the Miller trial is just the beginning."
You can reach Betty Brink at betty.brink@fwweekly.com mailto:betty.brink@fwweekly.com.

Would You Treat Your Dog This Way?

Medical Neglect Is the Norm in Women's Prisons

By Betty Brink, Ms. Magazine. Posted October 20, 2008.

Women inmates die and suffer from medical neglect in a prison system that is much more of a threat to them than they are to anyone else

My name is Janice Pugh. I was released from FMC Carswell [the only federal prison facility in the U.S. that includes a hospital for inmates] on January 10, 2000. ... The reason for me being at Carswell was for medical treatment. I have a history of lung cancer. ... The last six months I was coughing up blood, and a lot of it. ... There was sputum tests done and a test where they put a scope down your nose. Well, I received NO results from these tests. ... [Pugh went home to Alabama after her release; she had served 18 months for drug possession.] On January 20 at the Southern University of Alabama Medical Center there was a test done. ... On January 24 I was admitted. ... A bacteria was found growing in my lungs ... and a mass was found on my top right lobe. They done a biopsy today, January 31, 2000. This is just a few things I have to say and proof that it's true.

On March 27, 2000, two months after I received this letter, Janice Pugh died of metastasized cancer in a Mobile, Ala., hospice. She was 52 years old. She had served her sentence at FMC (Federal Medical Center) Carswell, near Fort Worth, Texas, because of her medical needs, yet her symptoms went undiagnosed and untreated there.

"We were told by the oncologist who treated Mama [in Alabama] that she was 'very neglected' at Carswell," said her daughter, Tracy Ingram.

I wish I could write that Janice Pugh's case is an aberration. It is not. For almost a decade, I have been writing about the Janice Pughs of FMC Carswell -- women as old as 80 and as young as 18, from all races and all classes, who have needlessly suffered or died from what a former Carswell doctor described as "medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays" in treatment.

Behind the nation's razor-wire fences, egregious medical neglect has been the norm for decades. But for the most part, this dark side of prison life is ignored by the mainstream media and lawmakers, and too often accepted by the general population as just another price paid by those committing crimes. The Carswell women's debt to society, however, shouldn't have included their lives.

The hospital at Carswell is located on a former World War II Air Force base. The facility opened in June 1994 after the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) closed its women's hospital in Lexington, Ky., following a scathing General Accounting Office report that cited the bureau for failing to provide adequate medical care in its federal prisons and singled out the Lexington hospital's care as particularly egregious. Little has changed since then, critics say.

According to Bureau of Prison figures, more than 32,500 women were incarcerated in the nation's federal prisons as of this June. That's far fewer than men, but women's rates at all prisons (federal, state, local) are increasing at nearly double the men's.

Medical neglect is not the only hazard faced by women at Carswell. This May, Vincent Inametti, the prison's Catholic chaplain for the past seven years, was sentenced to four years in jail for what the judge called "surprisingly heinous" sexual crimes against two imprisoned women. He is now the eighth sexual predator since 1997 to be convicted after working at Carswell. Most were professionals in high positions, including another chaplain, a gynecologist, a counselor, a supervisor of food services and three guards.

Most women currently behind bars in local jails, state prisons, federal penitentiaries and private for-profit penal institutions will eventually return to their communities. Their health care while incarcerated can thus have a huge social impact, financially and otherwise. If not treated effectively in prison hospitals, released inmates return to their homes with a host of mental and medical problems, including untreated AIDS and hepatitis.

Calls for an investigation of Carswell have been made to no avail by inmates' families for years. Their voices have now been joined by Ross Sears, a retired Texas appellate judge and former Harris County district attorney. He was drawn into the Carswell quagmire when a friend asked him in 2005 to help a breast-cancer victim who suffered from what he terms "grossly negligent follow-up care" at Carswell. He then contacted U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a longtime political friend, asking him to open a congressional investigation. Cornyn's staff contacted the Bureau of Prisons and got a response, but it was of the no-problems-here variety, so the senator took no further action.

What will get Congress' attention quicker than anything is media exposure and citizen outrage. In the meantime, little has changed for the Janice Pughs of Carswell, who remain largely forgotten as they continue to die and suffer needlessly from medical neglect in a prison system that is much more of a threat to them than they ever were to anyone else.

The full text of this article appears in the Summer issue of Ms. magazine, available on newsstands or by joining the Ms. community at www.msmagazine.com.

Hospital of Horrors Time In Carswell's Prison Medical Facility Can Be A Death Sentence For Women Prisoners By Betty Brink

(Original article w/pictures at: www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=3325)

This is the prison at Carswell. ...We got an inmate who is not breathing. She's turning blue." The 911 tape was scratchy, but the words were clear.

"Are they doing CPR?" the Med-Star ambulance company operator asked.

"I assume so," the caller replied. "They've got about 90 people up there. ..."

Betty Appleby gets angrier and more frustrated each time she listens to the tape, describing key moments in a tragedy that would change her large, closely knit family forever.

"Can you believe that? Ninety people? I know that's an exaggeration by whoever's calling, but what it says to me is that a lot of people were tramping around that cell and destroying evidence that could have helped us find out exactly what happened to my sister so that we could see justice done. And get some peace."

Appleby is speaking of her youngest sister, Linda D'Antuono Fenton -- the inmate who was "turning blue." On Feb. 23, 2004, Fenton was found unconscious and near death in a supposed high-security cell at Federal Medical Center Carswell -- a prison that a federal judge two years earlier had allegedly ordered her removed from. She was two days away from being released, after serving almost seven years for a drug offense -- two days before she could get out and, as she had promised in letters to her family and friends, tell the world about what was going on inside the Fort Worth federal prison hospital walls.

Fenton was 34 years old. In her last month at Carswell, she'd written her family long, excited letters about how happy she was to be almost done with prison, about finding a job and getting new clothes and starting fresh.

"Linda wanted to leave that place in style," Appleby said. "My mother had a limo hired to pick her up at the gate. But instead, she came home in a body bag."

The night of the 911 call, Fenton was taken to Fort Worth Osteopathic Medical Center. She died there eight days later, without ever regaining consciousness, with her family members at her bedside -- and with shackles on her legs, two guards on duty to watch her. "She was in a coma, for God's sake," her brother said. "Where was the compassion for my mother? For us?"

The Tarrant County medical examiner's office ruled Fenton's death a suicide by hanging. But like just about everything else in the official record concerning the death, it's a ruling that Fenton's family and friends, and current and former inmates of Carswell, find impossible to believe.

Reports from inside the prison vary widely on almost every point: whether she had been suicidal, exactly how and in what condition she was found -- and why she was where she was. Prison officials told the family that Fenton had become suicidal early on Feb. 23 and had been put on suicide watch -- but her friends at the prison said Fenton was not suicidal and in fact was giddy with the thought of freedom. The cell in the Security Housing Unit where she was found was not the place where those on suicide watch were supposed to be held.

A Florida pathologist who performed a second autopsy concluded that Fenton's injuries were not consistent with suicide by hanging, but with being placed in a "lethal choke hold" like that taught to many prison guards and police officers -- and which one former inmate said is used frequently at Carswell. Her clothes, which might have provided further evidence, disappeared. Hospital officials refused her family's request to examine her body for signs of sexual abuse.

Fenton never got out to raise the hell about prison conditions that she had threatened. But more than a year later, the controversies surrounding her death are serving the same purpose, shining a spotlight on Carswell, the federal Bureau of Prison's only medical and psychiatric hospital for women inmates -- and indeed, on the treatment of women in other federal prison facilities.

The questions about Carswell go beyond those in Fenton's case. Nicole Vasquez, 27, and Mari Ayn Sailer, 29, died there in August and September, respectively, under questionable circumstances. Vasquez, a recent surgery patient, died of septic shock after prison medical personnel apparently ignored her pleas for help. In Sailer's case, the prison notified the Tarrant County medical examiner's office that it would send her body for an autopsy -- and then reversed the decision. The prison told medical examiners they had decided not to do an autopsy, which is contrary to prison policy, according to Carswell spokesperson Deborah Denham. Only under pressure from Sailer's family did prison officials agree to do their own autopsy. The family is still waiting on the report.

Accusations of gross medical neglect, rape by prison guards, and toxic exposure for prison workers -- problems that Fort Worth Weekly has been reporting on since 1999 -- continue to pile up. In 1999, Beverly Joseph almost died from congestive heart failure after a physician's assistant diagnosed her severe chest pain as a urinary tract infection. Marilyn Shirley, a prisoner at the low-security camp just outside the hospital compound, was raped by a prison guard in 2000. The same year Janice Pugh died from brain cancer that was never treated. Tom Charles, a former Bureau of Prisons maintenance worker, is totally disabled after days of exposure to lead dust from working there in 1999. Today, Darlene Fortwendel is dying from untreated liver cancer. And the list goes on. More families, former inmates, and advocates are coming forward asking for answers and, thus far, getting precious few. Some still have family members confined there -- including those whose limited prison sentences for nonviolent crimes threaten to become death sentences because of the failure of prison officials to provide proper care.

Carswell's response to questions about its medical care is boilerplate: "We provide care that is comparable to community standards," said Denham, executive assistant to Warden Ginny Van Buren, who does not give interviews. The Bureau of Prisons claims that the Carswell situation is unique because many of the women who are sent there have histories of long-term drug abuse or previously untreated illnesses due to poverty. "At Carswell," BOP spokesperson Mike Truman said, "many of these women are getting quality medical care for the first time in years."

Not true, said recently released inmate Dana Corum, a brittle diabetic whose own case of medical neglect was described by the Weekly in 2000. Because the hospital failed to provide her with proper medications and a diabetic diet, she is now in kidney failure. "The place is not getting better," she said. "What's worse now, the women who are dying are young, like Linda."

Brian McCarthy, the Florida pathologist who re-autopsied Fenton at the request of her family, said that her 102-pound body showed a "pattern of bruises" on her arms, neck and wrists that were "consistent with the effects of a physical struggle." His investigation, he wrote, led him to only one conclusion: "Linda Fenton's death ... was an act of premeditated murder."

Linda Fenton was no model prisoner at Carswell. She was combative -- sometimes physically -- and always willing to tell prison officials what she thought of them. Those tendencies had their roots in a condition she could not control. When she was 11, an auto accident put her in a coma for 10 days and left her with severe frontal-lobe head injuries. Her brother, Paul D'Antuono, said she subsequently developed Tourette's syndrome, a severe neurological disorder characterized by facial and body tics and often accompanied by compulsive utterances and obscenities. She spent the next six years in a psychiatric hospital under treatment for the condition. "Our mother moved to Fort Lauderdale [where the state hospital was located] so she could spend every day with Linda," D'Antuono said.

In a letter to the FBI, McCarthy explained that, although the condition did not impair Fenton's intellectual abilities, it made her "a loose cannon, capable of being verbally offensive, confrontational, and irritating" and "destined for chronic mental illness ... for the rest of her life." Fenton, the pathologist said, should never have been assigned to a place like Carswell, where "her emotional defects were not recognized and ... she was not given appropriate medical treatment."

Her siblings and friends said Fenton, nonetheless, had a keen intellect and was capable of being loving and kind, a devoted friend to fellow inmates. "Everybody loved that girl," Corum said.

Well, not everybody. She spent a lot of time in lockdown -- in the Security Housing Unit, the same place where she would wind up with a sheet knotted around her neck. The SHU is an isolation unit for disruptive inmates or those who break the rules. Most often she was sent there as a result of mouthing off to guards and doctors. "The only difference between us and them," she wrote in a letter in 2001, "is they haven't had to stand in front of a judge, yet. I wouldn't let most of them take out the garbage or pull weeds in the yard. And I have a bad habit of telling them just what I think about them. Then when they lock me down for it I usually fight them. The way I think of it is, if I got to go down it's gonna be in a Blaze of Glory and I'm gonna take a few of them with me!! Right?!? ... I'm a Rebel Without a Cause, the only cause I have is Be-cause it's the principle of the matter!!"

Then, in a chilling foretelling of her death, Fenton wrote that she didn't think she would leave the prison alive. "I honestly don't know if I'm gonna be able to make it through this ... I think this place is gonna end up killing me, and I'm gonna end up dying in prison way out here in Texas all by myself."

At Carswell, Linda's verbal battles were primarily waged against her psychiatrist, Carswell chief of psychiatry William Pederson, and one guard.

One incident, involving another guard, was witnessed by Fenton's mother and stepfather when they came to spend time with her on her birthday in 2003. As they waited for her to be brought to the visitor's room, they heard a commotion, and Linda started screaming in the hall. She had said something to set off one of the guards, who threatened to take her back without allowing her to see her parents. According to her stepfather, Fenton told the guard, "I know I'm an inmate, but I'm a human being." The guard yelled, "You are not an inmate or a human being. You are a psychotic and a fucking lunatic. If you don't shut your fucking mouth, I will rearrange your fucking face." Fenton's stepfather, Bill Brown, complained about the incident in a July 3, 2003, letter to BOP director Harley Lappin, but got no reply.

Fenton's distrust of Pederson was well known to her family and her inmate friends. She complained regularly about his attempts to force her to take two powerful anti-psychotic drugs, Haldol and Thorazine, which her medical records show she was allergic to. Yet in 2002, Pederson went to federal court seeking a judge's order to compel her to take the medications. The court denied the request and instead ordered the prison agency to transfer Fenton out of Carswell, according to Fenton's mother, Dorothy Brown. Fenton told her mom that the judge said she needed to be in a less-stressful environment and recommended a low-security prison camp. BOP never complied with the order.

Denham declined to answer questions about Pederson or his treatment of Fenton. All she is allowed to say, Denham replied via e-mail, is that Pederson is a psychiatrist at the prison.

Requests by the Weekly to interview Pederson were also turned down. Denham is the only person authorized to speak for the prison, she said.

Fenton had also written that she was going to sue Pederson as soon as she got out, along with "a whole lot of women here that are planning on bringing suit against him for malpractice."

"Linda was not suicidal. "She was ready to go home."

The inmate was adamant about her friend -- outraged enough to risk writing to a reporter, but worried enough about retribution to ask that her name not be revealed. "There is more to her story, and it is probably connected to the rapes here," she wrote. She didn't elaborate, but theWeekly has documented one rape and at least seven cases of sexual misconduct at Carswell that have led to prison terms or firings for the men involved. "They did not protect her," the inmate wrote of Fenton. "She is the only prisoner I have ever known who was put on suicide watch and left unattended."

Whether or not Linda Fenton had threatened suicide is only the first of many questions about what happened in the last few days of her life. And on this, as many other points, the information provided by prison officials to civilian doctors and to Fenton's family is full of discrepancies.

Because prison officials declined to speak with the Weekly about Fenton's case -- and, by press time, the BOP had not fulfilled an open records request for copies of public portions of her file -- much of the official version of events is gleaned from what Fenton's family was told and from Fenton's treatment record at the Fort Worth Osteopathic Medical Center. Her family provided the Weekly with copies of the doctor's reports and the Tarrant County medical examiner's autopsy.

Osteopathic doctors, according to those records, were told by prison authorities that Fenton had "a history of suicide attempt by hanging." But in the same paragraph, the civilian doctor also wrote, "apparently the patient has been making suicidal threats for several days, but she has no previous history of prior attempts."

Christopher McGee, the Carswell social worker assigned to Fenton, told her family a week after Fenton's death that there had been no suicide attempts. Family members said McGee told them that Fenton was put in SHU because, after a going-away party planned by Fenton's inmate buddies was inexplicably cancelled by Pederson, Fenton "lost it," becoming angry and combative. He did tell them she was on 24-hour watch, which contradicts a guard's report that she was alone when she was found, as well as the osteopathic doctor's determination that she had been comatose for the better part of an hour before efforts to save her began.

McGee was not available for comment.

Former inmate Dana Corum and a current prisoner, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, both told the Weekly that the word among other inmates at the prison hospital was that Fenton was in the SHU on suicide watch because she was afraid to go home -- a contention disputed by Fenton's letters as well as by her family and friends.

Tonya Wrisley shared the psychiatric unit at Carswell with Fenton for the last three months of Fenton's life. "We were very close friends," she said recently from her home near Portland. The two women spent "a lot of time together and confided in each other," Wrisley said. She too had heard that Fenton killed herself out of fear of going home, a tale Wrisley dismissed out of hand. "Linda was so excited about going home. She had made all these plans about what she was going to do, and she had everything ready. I will never believe she killed herself."

Indeed, her long hand-written letters to her mother and other family members from that period paint a picture of a woman excited and full of hope for a new life free of the drugs and fast living that had landed her in prison.

"Linda was happy, excited; she just wanted to do her mission," Wrisley said.

That "mission," Linda's sister, Betty Appleby, said, was to work with at-risk kids to keep them out of jail. "There is no way Linda would have taken her own life," Appleby said. "She was coming home in two days. She had survived that place, and she was so excited to be finally getting out."

Fenton had already arranged for job training in her mother's hometown of Inverness, Fla., and had a letter of acceptance into a Salvation Army program that helps ex-cons find work. In her last letters home, she asked her mother to get her a training manual so she could get a Florida driver's license. She even asked Dorothy to spray perfume on new clothes she was sending for Linda to wear home.

"After all those years in prison," Appleby said, "she wanted to feel her femininity again. It may seem silly, but that broke my heart when I read it. Those weren't the words of someone planning to kill herself in a few days."

If Fenton was suicidal, her treatment by Carswell prison personnel violated the Bureau of Prison's written policy on suicide intervention. The BOP policy states that any inmate threatening self-harm must be placed in a special "suicide watch room" and be kept under 24-hour observation. That room is not in SHU -- and in fact the policy states that if an inmate is already in the SHU at the time of a suicide threat, she must be removed immediately to the designated room, where the person watching her "will have verbal communication with and CONSTANT observation of the suicidal inmate at all times." (BOP emphasis.) The policy is also clear that if an inmate does commit suicide, the place where she is found must be preserved as a crime scene and all evidence preserved. Denham said the Carswell prison follows the BOP policy to the letter.

Nonetheless, prison officials told Osteopathic Medical Center doctors that the inmate was alone "at the time of this incident." Doctors estimated that Fenton had probably been unconscious and in respiratory distress for half an hour to 45 minutes before anyone intervened to attempt resuscitating her.

Another former Carswell inmate who is now a university professor said that if Fenton had been on suicide watch, she wouldn't have been left alone for half an hour or more, nor would she have had a regular sheet with which to hang herself. BOP rules confirm that a suicide-watch room was not supposed to contain sheets.

"Those on suicide watch would be put in there with paper blankets and have [other] prisoners sit outside the Plexiglas and watch them 24/7," she wrote. The ex-inmate, who asked that her name not be used because she still fears retaliation, was sometimes one of those asked to sit and watch those troubled women.

On the other hand, she said, it's possible that Fenton was subjected to a choke hold. "They are routinely used on male and female prisoners alike to subdue them," she said.

In Fenton's case, prison officials' accounts also differ about what they found when they finally came to see about her. According to the records, prison officials told the osteopathic hospital personnel that Fenton was found "hanging by a bed sheet" -- which is also reflected in the Tarrant County medical examiner's report. Not so, McGee, the social worker, told Fenton's family a week later. According to relatives, McGee said Fenton was found lying on the bed with a sheet knotted around her neck so tightly that paramedics had to cut it off.

Appleby said McGee "rather nonchalantly" told the family that Fenton couldn't have hanged herself because there was nothing in the cell to which she could have tied the sheet in order to do that.

"None of the stories add up," Paul D'Antuono said. "Do you see why we're suspicious?"

There are lots of people suspicious about the Carswell prison camp and hospital these days, including the families of two young women who died there within the last few months.

Nicole Vasquez was 27, two months away from her release date after serving time on a drug charge; she died Aug. 1. Mari Ayn Sailer, 29, had served a year of her 18-month sentence for tax fraud when she died on Sept. 12. Inmate witnesses say that, in the days leading up to the deaths, both women repeatedly begged prison medical personnel for help, but neither received it.

"The medical officer always sent them back untreated," said Corum, who knew both women.

In the strange world of the prison hospital, medical care for those considered to have less-serious health problems consists of an inmate getting herself from her own floor to the "medical" floor to stand in line to ask for help or to sit in line in a wheelchair.

Darlene Fortwendel, an ex-inmate suffering from a rare form of liver cancer, knows first-hand about Carswell's medical "care." She finally won a compassionate release from Carswell a month ago after seven months in which prison hospital doctors refused to treat her cancer. She was there when Vasquez died.

Vasquez, who suffered from lupus, had had heart surgery in late 2004 in a Connecticut hospital while serving time at the federal prison there. She was sent to Carswell for follow-up care.

"She had complained of severe aches and fever," Fortwendel said, but when Vasquez went to sick call, she received only over-the-counter meds, which seemed to be of little help. In spite of Fortwendel's own illness, she and Corum and others in the fifth-floor chronic care section of the hospital did their best to take care of Vasquez. "She was very sick, and there is no nurse on duty on that floor," Fortwendel said. If an inmate gets in distress, the only persons near enough to help them are the guards or their fellow inmates.

Vasquez died in the night "throwing up all over herself," Corum said.

Prison spokesman Mike Truman said an autopsy showed Vasquez died of septic shock. According to the National Institutes of Health web site, septic shock is the result of an overwhelming infection that can develop after surgery.

Sailer's family, in contrast, doesn't even have an autopsy report. They still don't know why she died. Her brother, Bruce Sailer, is sure he is being lied to about her death. She entered Carswell as a psychiatric patient, having suffered much of her life from depression and bipolar personality disorder, but was physically healthy, Bruce said. "My sister was only 29," he wrote in an e-mail to the Weekly. Twenty-nine-year-olds "don't just die in their sleep. ... I'm scared that I will never find out why my sister died."

Another inmate who knew Sailer said she died after being found unconscious in her bed and that the equipment needed to resuscitate her was not available on her floor.

When asked for a copy of Sailer's autopsy report, prison spokeswoman Denham referred the Weekly to the Tarrant County medical examiner because that office "did the autopsies on all deaths at the prison." But not Sailer's, it seems. Elvela Young, who handles records for the medical examiner's office, said that, just as personnel from that office were expecting to autopsy Mari Ayn, the prison called and stopped it. "We never got the body," Young said. "They took jurisdiction back." And in spite of Denham's statement, Young said, "We haven't done [autopsies of women who died at the prison] in many years."

Bruce Sailer wrote that when he asked why the prison had taken the body back, he was told it was because "there was no blunt trauma to her body, and therefore no foul play, and no autopsy was necessary."

"I clearly stated to the people at Carswell that my family wants an autopsy," he wrote. The prison then agreed to do one, he said, but told him it would take "four to six weeks" for an autopsy report to be released before he could learn her cause of death. So far all he has received is a form letter from the prison saying she died because "her heart stopped." What the prison has done, he said, "is just wrong, and I'm sure illegal."

Denham said that in all deaths at a federal prison, no matter the cause, an autopsy is required. The prison agency's web site states that, "If there is not obvious traumatic injury, a complete autopsy report bearing original signatures and notarized must be provided." Denham said Sailer's autopsy has not been released.

The ex-inmate who is now a university professor said that medical conditions in Carswell's psych ward were so unbelievable when she was there from 2002 until her release last year that she sometimes thinks she dreamed it. She herself was never confined there, but said she was sometimes recruited to help watch those on the lock-down floor. "Some of these women were locked in essentially Plexiglas cages," she said. "Some were naked, had thrown food at the walls and floors and even feces."

Corum, who was still in Carswell when Sailer died, vividly remembered the younger woman's suffering. "She kept telling [the medical officers] on the medical floor that she was sick," Corum said, "and they kept sending her back to her floor without treating her." She was sleeping in a large dormitory-like room with about 10 other beds, Corum said. "When she was found, they took her out on a stretcher with an oxygen mask on her face." Not long after her body was removed, Corum said, "FBI agents were running around all over the place."

In recent weeks, still other families have come forward with allegations of egregious medical neglect against inmates who are still alive -- but whom their loved ones fear will not survive to be released. All are women who have been convicted of non-violent drug or white-collar crimes.

Some like Nina Baum Best of New York were sent to Carswell after being injured in other prisons. She was sentenced to 18 months for passport fraud in November, 2004. "She was healthy and walking that day in the courtroom," her brother David Baum wrote in an e-mail. After nearly a year in the custody of the BOP, she is now in a wheelchair, requires the use of a catheter, and is suffering from a variety of debilitating ailments, some so severe that David Baum fears she will die in prison. He also charges that many of her injuries were inflicted by her prison caregivers.

Best's troubles began at Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut, her brother said, where over a period of three weeks, she was "beaten around the head and thrown into the SHU, shackled naked in the shower, put in a straitjacket, and denied food." The inhumane treatment was inflicted, he said, as punishment for minor infractions. When she found she couldn't urinate after a long lock-down period in which she had little food and water "she was refused a catheter, leaving her in excruciating pain," her brother wrote. Now, she has bladder damage and cannot urinate without a catheter.

When his sister was sent to Carswell, Baum said, the family was encouraged, because they believed she would finally be treated humanely and receive decent care. But at Carswell, he said, she has been "caught between incompetence and malice." Not long after she arrived, she contracted shingles and is in constant pain with little or no treatment, he said, and she is still regularly sent to the SHU, even though she is in a wheelchair. "Worst of all," Baum said, "she is losing hope."

Billy Wilson's sister, Evelyn Jones, was diagnosed with a "rare form of gallbladder cancer" in July while serving time at the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in College Station, he said. She was sent to Carswell, basically to die, Wilson wrote in an e-mail. "The initial prognosis [for life] was two weeks." Three months later she is still alive, Wilson points out, even though Carswell had put her in its hospice program and refused to give her any kind of treatment other than pain meds. The family asked for a second opinion. It took over a month, Wilson wrote, for the hospital to arrange a PET scan. After that, her prognosis was changed to say that she has four to six months to live.

"Our family feels that there is a possibility that the doctors [who gave the first prognosis] were wrong and that if my sister had been given treatment immediately, she might have had a fighting chance to live ... . I feel she is on the track to become the next victim of the prison system at Carswell."

Now, the family's hope hinges on a compassionate release request that they made through FedCure, a nonprofit group that assists in helping families of those in prison. "If we could get her released," Wilson said, "we think we could get her some treatment that would extend her life." As of this writing, the family is still waiting.

The repeated cases of medical neglect and sexual misconduct have put Carswell on the radar screen of several prison reform groups. FedCure and the American Bar Association's Correction and Sentencing Committee, led by such advocates as former Justice Department attorney Margaret Love, are lobbying for sentencing reform and expanded conditions for early release for non-violent prisoners who are ill, dying, elderly or have young children. So far, however, their efforts have had little result in Congress, even though Love said "the courts are ready, and most U.S. attorneys are ready."

On the other hand, Stop Prison Rape last year convinced Congress to pass the first comprehensive prison rape prevention act in the nation's history -- with help from the testimony of Carswell rape survivor Marilyn Shirley.

Linda Fenton's family is no longer expecting any justice from Carswell. They are convinced that prison officials have covered up the true circumstances of her death. "We're not about to rest or stop until all of those involved in Linda's death are held accountable and the prison shut down," Appleby said.

Her brother Paul has pushed the FBI to open an investigation. The family has hired the same law firm that two years ago won a $4 million judgment for ex-inmate Marilyn Shirley against the Carswell prison guard who has also been convicted in criminal court of raping her.

Paul D'Antuono said he thinks he's beginning to get the picture of what may have happened to his baby sister. "She was a fighter," he said. "She wasn't afraid of anyone. ...She would get in your face and tell you just what she thought of you or what you were doing, no matter the outcome." And often, he said, her language was blue. "Unlike you or me," he said, "Linda couldn't help herself."

Her brother is sure that she would have fought "like a tiger" when they tried to lock her in the SHU and believes guards could have killed her in trying to control her. Or, he said, her death could have been intentional.

Immediately after Fenton's death, the family asked that she be examined to determine if she had been sexually assaulted. A hospital official refused, saying the family would first have to file a police report.

"The family had no reason to believe that [rape] had occurred," the doctor wrote. But he also noted that "They were however concerned in regards to bruises on her hips and a bump on her head." A search for semen was never done, another investigative lapse that makes Appleby angry. "Why would we have to file a police report to get them to pick up a Q-tip and do a swab? How much trouble could it be?"

When McCarthy, the Florida pathologist, wrote to the FBI requesting an investigation, he noted that "The entire crime scene was ... handled with a lack of professionalism."

McCarthy's postmortem exam and his own investigation led him to conclude not only that Fenton had died following a "physical struggle and placement of a police choke hold," but that she had in fact been murdered.

McCarthy and Paul D'Antuono both believe there were staff members at Carswell who had reason to fear Fenton's return to the outside world. She had made no secret of the fact that she was going to blow the whistle on what she claimed were medical malpractice and other wrongdoings at the prison. "I'm gonna get in touch with all the major networks," she wrote in one letter, "and let the American public know what kind of things not only Dr. [Pederson] but the entire prison system has been doing to us, all at the taxpayer's expense."

Now, her brother said, "We will never know what Linda knew. Or even why she died, unless someone is willing to come forward. Someone out there knows the truth."

You can reach Betty Brink at betty.brink@fwweekly.com

What Happened to Due Process?

No Mercy at Federal Prisons

By BETTY BRINK

Special to The Progressive Populist

Fort Worth, Texas

The "neglected work of mercy," says Kathleen Rumpf, is helping those in prison. The 48-year-old Catholic lay worker and Ploughshares activist from Syracuse, New York, ought to know. She's been arrested 80 times, spending from ten days to 18 months behind bars for acts of civil disobedience that began 28 years ago with Rumpf's first lone three-day vigil on the steps of the Pentagon.

On July 21, she was released from the Federal Medical Center-Carswell, just outside Fort Worth, where she spent the last eight months of a year-long sentence for rewriting the welcome sign for the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, to read "School of Shame." SOA graduates include some the most brutal assassins and human rights violators in Latin America's history, all trained in their slimy craft with U.S. tax money. For messing up its sign, Rumpf and four fellow Ploughshares members each were sentenced to a year in prison, fined $2,000 and ordered to pay $1,025 in restitution (to re-letter the sign.)

"Americans can feel safer in their beds with this dangerous bunch behind bars," her hometown paper, the Syracuse Herald-Tribune wrote following the sentencing.

Rumpf, who has artificial knees, was sent to the Bureau of Prisons medical center for women at the former Carswell Air Force Base where about 1,100 women are in custody.

The facility may yet rue the day she showed up behind its razor wire-enclosed walls. After spending almost a year there, she's convinced that women are being denied basic medical care resulting in unnecessary suffering and death, and she's telling everyone who will listen.

On top of that, Warden J.B. Brogan likely will remember July 19, the day Rumpf's time was officially up. On that day he inadvertently let the public in on another well-kept secret: a Bureau of Prisons policy that allows prison time to be extended "indefinitely" by a warden -- without the benefit of due process.

By 7:30 that morning, about 20 of Rumpf's supporters were outside the air base's south gate, waiting for her release. Actor Martin Sheen, a fellow Ploughshares activist and some-time comrade in handcuffs -- arrested "58 times over the past ten years, one for every year of my life," he said -- was en-route from Los Angeles. Sheen and Rumpf were supposed to appear over the next few days at a series of events, spearheaded by State Representative Lon Burnam, a Fort Worth Democrat, and Fort Worth City Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Ralph McCloud to raise money for Libra, a legal aid fund for indigent women prisoners or their survivors who believe they were denied needed medical care at Carswell.)

Burnam, a life-long social justice activist and no newcomer on such issues to Fort Worth's press corps, was holding forth that morning on the evils of the SOA. None of the reporters on hand had ever heard of Rumpf -- one 30-something TV reporter was clueless even about the School of the Americas -- but clearly the new kid on the block was McCloud, the Coordinator for Peace and Justice for Fort Worth's Catholic diocese when he's not wearing his council hat. Here was the councilman, who was usually low-key and impeccably dressed, duded up in jeans and anti-SOA T-shirt, calling the training camp "one of the most heinous institutions of our times" while sweating in the noonday sun with a bunch of rabble-rousers and waiting to embrace a convicted felon. McCloud would be all over the TV news and the front page of theFort Worth Star-Telegram. With that coverage, of course, came the report that Rumpf had not been released -- and why.

Two days before, Warden Brogan, acting under a little-known federal statute that dates back to the late 1980s and one that even Rumpf's local attorney, Maureen Tolbert, hadn't heard of, ordered Rumpf to sign a promissory note for the unpaid $2,000 fine, or be held "indefinitely."

Rumpf, who survives solely on Social Security Disability, refused on grounds of poverty and principal.

Brogan refused to release her.

"This statute basically says 'if your fine is over $150 and you don't sign a promissory note to pay it off after you get out, the BOP can hold you until you sign'," said a furious Tolbert, a criminal defense lawyer whose clients are indigents assigned by the Tarrant County courts. It "squeezes the poor, forcing them to choose between lying or staying in jail.

"If they sign in order to get out, which most people will do, and then can't pay because they don't have the money, they can be sent right back to prison. If they refuse to sign, they can be held in prison until they do. It's a nail in their coffin either way."

As the statute is written, there is no provision for a hearing, no right to an attorney, nor is there any time restraint on how long the Bureau of Prisons can hold a prisoner who refuses to sign. Tolbert says the statute is "clearly" a separation of powers issue and unconstitutional.

"It allows prison officials, who have no constitutional authority to do so, to basically re-sentence someone who has served his or her time. That role belongs to the courts and a judge, following due process."

Burnam, who waited outside the gates of the air base for three hours for the release that didn't come, put it more bluntly: "This is nothing more than debtor's prison. Didn't we got rid of that with a revolution?"

The law's been challenged twice in separate federal district courts, in appeals filed by the same prisoner, Jabari Zakiya, a former NASA employee sentenced to 16 months and a $25,000 fine for tax evasion. In 1996, the first court upheld the statute; the second, in May of this year, tossed it out as unconstitutional based on the separation of powers argument.

"That [last] court ruled that to take this ... to its logical conclusion, someone could be held for life for a fine of $150," Tolbert said.

By the time the court ruled in Zakiya's favor, he had served three years beyond the time of his original sentence.

For Rumpf, the point became moot after two days of extended jail time. Friends in Syracuse raised the $2,000 to pay her fine and she walked out of the prison a free woman on July 21.

"This doesn't mean the issue of 'debtors prison' is gonna go away," Tolbert said. "Two of the others sentenced with Kathleen [a priest serving his time in Washington State and a nun in Kentucky] are due to be released in November. They say they won't sign either, which may get this to the Supreme Court, where it's bound to be overturned -- it's so blatant."

In the meantime, Rumpf is back in Syracuse building a file on women prisoners -- or their survivors -- who may have been injured or died as a result of medical care withheld at Carswell.

Sheen spent two days in Fort Worth fielding more questions from the local press about John F. Kennedy, whose son had just flown nose first into the Atlantic, than the SOA or Rumpf ("I didn't know John Kennedy, guys, I only played him," he reminded reporters). He flew back to Los Angeles to begin work on a new TV series about a liberal Democratic president. "This only makes me a living," he said before he left, "so I can do the real work of this world, like shutting down the School of the Americas."

Is This Really Happening in America?

Posted: October 29, 2008 04:10 PM

Carswell Prison Blues

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Read More: Cancer, Carswell, Medicine, Prison, Prisoners, Women's Rights, Living News

Darlene Fortwendel was sent to the hospital with a diagnosis of early stage liver cancer and a recommendation that doctors start treatment immediately. Instead, new tests were ordered and then delayed for months. Even when tests finally confirmed the original diagnosis, treatment was never begun. Six months later Fortwendel was dead. She was 45.

A couple of years earlier, at the same hospital, Janice Pugh, with a history of lung cancer that had been in remission, was admitted for observation and soon began coughing up blood. A recommendation from the hospital's contract oncologist that an immediate biopsy be done was ignored. Instead, Pugh was released with an assurance from a medical officer there that she was cancer free. Two months later she was dead at 52 from lung cancer that had spread throughout her body.

These cases didn't occur in some primitive Third World medical clinic. The two women were prisoners serving their sentences at the Federal Medical Center Carswell, the only hospital in the country for women who have been convicted of a federal crime--and their stories are the norm, not the exception. Located behind a razor-wire fence on a former Air Force base just outside Fort Worth Texas, it houses 600 to 700 offenders who have critical medical or psychiatric needs. They are as old as 86 and as young as 18 and hail from every ethnic, social and economic class, most of them having been convicted of white-collar or drug-related crimes.

The oldest inmate to die at FMC Carswell was Alva Mae "Granny" Groves, who succumbed to various age-related illnesses in 2007 after her family's pleas for early release were consistently denied. She was in the thirteenth year of a 24-year sentence, convicted of trading crack cocaine for food stamps. Her real crime, her family said, was refusing to testify against her adult children, who were the actual targets of the FBI investigation that sent her to prison as a "co-conspirator."

The youngest to die there was Nicole Vasquez, 27, who was serving 18 months for a drug crime. She was sent to Carswell three years ago to recover from heart surgery performed at an outside hospital. Yet she was assigned to clean toilets on her floor, and had been denied treatment for weeks after reporting severe flu-like symptoms. Her death was initially attributed to septic shock, then to complications from the surgery.

Besides medical neglect, rape is another threat routinely faced by the women of Carswell. Since 1997, seven men--including two chaplains, a counselor and two doctors--have been convicted of rape or other sexual offenses against women there (one was fired for sexual misconduct but never brought to trial). ACLU Prison Project staffer Jackie Walker said that so many convictions of high-level staff raise questions about "just what kind of culture there allows this to happen."

The Carswell stories, which I've been documenting for almost a decade for my home paper, Fort Worth Weekly and most recently for the summer 2008 issue of Ms. magazine, are hardly unique in a nation with more than 2 million citizens behind bars. From the local jails to the state and federal systems, egregious medical neglect and rape is rampant, say prison reform advocates such as Brenda Smith, a professor at American University Washington College of Law in D.C. and a specialist in women-prisoner issues. And she warns that what happens in our nations prisons doesn't stay in the prisons: Most of these men and women will be released at some point, bringing back to their home communities untreated and contagious diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis-B, as well as a host of psychological problems (especially among the rape victims). These women will ultimately be the responsibility of that community's taxpayers and its overwhelmed medical system.

And then there are those who won't come home because they have died from neglect or indifference, leaving orphaned children and broken families whose despair and anger will eventually have a huge social impact.

Yet the medical neglect in our prisons is too-often accepted by the public as just another price paid by those who commit crimes. But as the angry sister of Fortwendel said about her death, "My sister's sentence was for a white-collar crime--it wasn't a death sentence, but that's what she got when she was sent to Carswell."

This article was written by Betty Brink, Staff Writer for The Fort Worth Weekly

Medical Center or Torture Center

From the April 2009 Idaho Observer:

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BOP denies compassionate release for woman made terminally ill in toxic federal prison;scheduled work release after drug conviction denied: BOP effectively imposing death penalty

by The Idaho Observer

Karla Fuller, a long time resident of Harpster, Idaho, was sent to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) after a drug related conviction in Wyoming. Her family attorney, Wesley W. Hoyt, reported:

"She was eligible for and partially completed an in-prison drug rehab program that would have earned her early release in February, 2009. Unfortunately, she had been assigned to USP Adelanto, a private prison located near Victorville, CA, where the groundwater table was contaminated by cancer-producing jet fuel from the now closed George USAF base. The cancer turned into astrocytoma, with a brain tumor on her spine at the base of her skull, putting her in a wheel chair and rendering her unable to concentrate; thus, she was unable to finish the class that would have guaranteed her early release."

Fuller has since been transferred to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell near Fort Worth, Texas. She would had been eligible for work release last April 2, but is being denied because she is too sick to work.

"Now the calloused powers-that-be at the BOP, indifferent to human suffering, have turned their heads away so that they don’t have to vomit after seeing the agony they have wrought. Karla’s face turns black and her body goes into convulsive spasm every few minutes, with involuntary arm and leg movements that the staff at FMC Carswell say she is ‘faking,’" said former deputy prosecuting attorney Hoyt.

Hoyt also reported that Carswell is supposed to be a "…women’s health care facility but actually is a torture chamber for female inmates who have become sick while doing time in the federal prison system. The private prison industry is alive and well because it is feeding off the misery of the American people and the families of those incarcerated feel so much shame that most have abandoned their loved ones to be the victims of Nazi extermination camp style tactics."

In Karla’s case, Hoyt said, "Just since November, 2008, Karla has lost two years of her life expectancy—thanks to the deliberate denial of timely medical treatment in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons."

Hoyt believes that W. Ellen Chapman, warden at FMC Carswell, has facilitated the deaths of many federally-imprisoned women sent to her institution who have no one to advocate for them on the outside.

The BOP is keenly aware of toxicity problems at Adelanto. There are no longer any female prisoners at Adelanto because they were moved out a few years ago due to the high incidence of various cancers among the women inmates.

Both women and men who become seriously ill while in BOP custody are transferred to prisons allegedly commissioned and equipped to provide necessary medical care. Hoyt makes serious charges regarding the medical treatment federal prisoners are receiving. "When medication or medical treatment is required, payment is received by the facility. Yet, when that medical treatment is denied, the owners of the private prisons pocket that money as profits. Taken over a large population of inmates, that amounts to millions of dollars of graft and corruption at the expense of the suffering of Americans."

Hoyt, in the family’s second request for a compassionate release, which was just denied by the BOP, points out to this warden: "In your response to the first Request for Compassionate Release, it stated that Karla ‘faked spasms and seizures.’ This is a bold face lie and you know it. But, you lied about this in your response just so you could fraudulently deny Karla’s request for compassionate release."

Hoyt added that "It is outrageous and unconscionable that the BOP did not release Karla as requested in December, 2008, for the reason that you, Warden Chapman, knew or should have known that Karla’s diagnosis was terminal (from her medical records provided by Dr. Patricio Reyes, Clinical Director, Phoenix, AZ - November 2008). At that time Karla had 2 to 2-1/2 years to live. Now she has only 6 months to live.

"These medical records," Hoyt continued, "coupled with the records of Dr. Bibas Reddy of the Center for Cancer, Fort Worth, Texas, all prove that Karla meets the test for a compassionate release. The fact that you, in the face of these absolute proofs of terminal condition, denied compassionate release by stating you lacked medical information and that her condition was terminal shows your complete callousness and complete dedication to deception. You had the official diagnosis that Karla had a terminal condition and you lied and said you didn’t have that official diagnosis. Yet you have her medical records which prove you lied."

Because of the callousness of the BOP and Chapman, Karla’s terminal condition has gotten worse.

In a letter from the BOP to Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) dated April 9, 2009, Warden Chapman denies all of Hoyt’s allegations of incompetence, criminality and medical neglect. She also denies that Fuller has only six months to live and that their oncologist believes that women with her type of cancer "...have a life expectancy of greater than two years."

For these reasons, a decision for compassionate release is being suspended pending the completion of daily radiation therapy and the receipt of a new prognosisfrom the consulting oncologists.

Chapman also claims that Fuller and her family have not been denied access to her medical records and that she can obtain them through normal channels and send them to anyone she pleases.

Fuller’s scheduled release date is Feb. 21, 2010. Regardless of Chapman’s denial of Hoyt’s charges and her claim that Fuller is getting proper medical attention, Hoyt and Fuller’s family believe that her condition is terminal and the BOP is keeping her confined hoping she will die before she—and the truth—get out.

In support of his concerns, Hoyt explained in his letter to Chapman, "For weeks during radiation treatment and for three weeks after, a total of nine weeks, you and your staff denied Karla her right to see a neurologist to obtain the vertigo patch which would have helped the spasms she was experiencing, because you and your staff had decided that Karla ‘was faking spasms and seizures.’ And the fact that your staff now wants to insert a feeding tube proves that you and they are liars because the need for a feeding tube is an admission of the severity of the Astrocytoma tumor that causes spasms and seizures that affect swallowing."

Fuller’s case is exemplary of a mindset that has been building within the ranks of federal enforcers for years and appears to have taken over completely now at every level of its functioning. Because the highest levels of government allow the barbaric torture of "terror war detainees," lower levels of government allow imprisoned Americans to be tortured. Similarly, because officials in the highest public offices lie and deceive the public, officials in lower offices feel comfortable lying to and deceiving the public.

Hoyt asked Chapman, "Have you lost your humanity as [did] the Nazis during WWII? Or are you too tied into the bureaucratic nonsense that refuses to look at the human side of the equation?"

A recent diagnosis shows that Karla now has three cranial tumors and is passing into the end of life scenario. Her tumor prevents her from walking. Fuller is wheelchair bound and has received radiation therapy on the Astrocytoma tumor at the right side of her brain stem (caused by the tumor). Now she has a tumor behind her ear.

Chapman claims that Fuller is receiving proper medical attention. Hoyt and Fuller’s family see it differently.

Hoyt explains that Fuller’s present physical condition is as follows: "Every night Karla is given a pill by prescription, which she cannot swallow because of the large lump in her throat caused by the cancer. No one can fake these physiological symptoms. A portion of the medicine invariably slips out of her mouth and falls to the floor as she obediently tries to swallow. Thus, she is missing needed medication due to misconduct by staff. Needless to say, she cannot fake these autonomic responses. Her blood pressure has been charted at 200/106 during spasms (otherwise it is 88/60 which is way too low)."

Now he told Chapman, "Your staff is considering an abdominal feeding tube. Such a tube likely will cause a staph infection, especially since she already had a staph infection in her throat on January 12, 2009, and she has been gagging from the lump in her throat. Because she cannot swallow, and has another lump in her sinus cavity between her eyes, now she has started chemotherapy and is at risk of death for aspirating her own fluids as a result of the nausea. Her mother, Darlene Fuller, has witnessed Karla going into spasms spontaneously even when slightly jostled."

The truth is that Darlene visited Karla every available day for the first three weeks of March 2009. Hoyt further accused these sadistic criminals by saying, "It’s a very clever way you and your colleagues have developed to torture people: Give them cancer and then deny them timely and effective medical treatment. You torture people—which is a crime against humanity.

"So it is very simple—you gave her the cancer [referring to her being put in Adelanto Correctional Facility in California, where she developed her cancer], and you kept her from timely treatment to make certain she would die a slow and painful death from it. She is being given steroids so that her face and head have swollen to almost twice normal size."

Karla’s diagnosis reveals that patients in her category "have a low cure rate with standard local treatment and are terminal, which affects the brain stem, breathing, blood pressure, heart beat and swallowing. Characteristics cause fatigue, headaches and incapacitating neurological deficits (seizures). The patient can lose consciousness, have uncontrolled movements of body, arms and legs and lose control over bowel and bladder. These are symptoms that cannot be faked and those at the BOP responsible for saying so are liars."

Another factor that few people are aware of is the tremendous volume of money being sucked out of the system by private companies housing prisoners.

Hoyt said to Warden Chapman: "You are bent on keeping Karla in prison to continue making a profit on her. You prolong the death of dying inmates for months or years while you profit from their suffering. And these innocents are being sent to prisons in large numbers to feed the prison industry in America. This is the great wickedness of the prison system in America today."

Hoyt believes that the private, for profit, prison system will cause the downfall of America unless someone stops it now.

He urges journalists to tell their readership about this great injustice before it is too late. He acknowledges that most media is controlled by the feds. "The Federal government is so full of lies that it is hard to find the truth. This whole scenario is very disturbing, but it must be dealt with because more and more innocent people are being falsely accused of crimes made up by the federal and state governments," he said. "Each of you journalists to whom I have sent this information knows of someone in your life who is in prison and suffering."

Hoyt closed by stating that Americans really need to start talking about the prison system and make our people aware of what is going on, "so we can quit ignoring the fact that our government is lying to us and abusing our people."

Federal System Corrupt

This is a reprinted letter but it is so very important...

MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES OFTEN ONEROUS AND COSTLY
by Joe Bogan

In my 30 years working in federal prisons, I witnessed the explosive growth in the inmate population send an evolution of harshness in punishment that I could not have imagined when I began. Both stem in large part from the mandatory minimum sentences enacted by the federal and state governments in response to the epidemic of illegal drugs in the 1970's and 1980's.
Those laws, passed in an effort to solve the crime and drug problem in a "get tough" environment, took any discretion in sentencing, even in non-violent cases, away from judges. The result is that in the United States we now imprison four times more people per capita as we did from 1920 to 1970. Our criminal justice system costs $147 billion a year, and annual prison costs alone are about $38 billion. No matter how well intended the lawmakers may have been, the laws need to be reformed.
Fortunately, this issue is beginning to gain national attention. Judges, including many federal ones, are speaking out. In part because of the drop in crime, public attitudes are shifting to support a more rational approach to punishment.
A bill has been intoduced to Congress (H.R. 1978) that would eliminate some "mandatory minimum" sentences. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala, has also proposed legislation to give judges more flexibility in certain cases. Hearings are expected soon.
Tonight ( at 8 p.m.) Court TV will air its first original TV movie, giving national audiences a look at the harrowing impact of mandatory minimum sentences. Starring Acadamy Award Mercedes Ruehl, "Guily by Association" tells the story of a widow with two children who has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her crime? She was involved with a charming but dissembling boyfriend, a drug dealer. Because she took a few messages, brought a gym bag to him, had a few of his friends over, she became ensnared in a "conspiracy" to sell marijuana. Her lover had led her unknowing into the vortex of this country's war on drugs. Her life would never be the same. It's a compelling drama and it's right on target.
In my experience, the population that has been harmed the most by mandatory minimum sentences has been women. Typically, these women made poor choices; usually they knew they were committing crimes-often in relationships with criminal men. The vast majority of them deserved, even needed, the intervention of the justice system. What they don't deserve are sentences that are vastly disproportionate to their actual crimes. A more sensible system of sentencing, which gives guidance to judges but allows discretion, is now needed.
Prisons should confine offenders for their criminal culpability but also reach out to their human capability. Many women in prison want to improve and restore their lives, heal from abuse, trauma, and guilt, become better mothers and more productive workers. That is easier to do if sentences are reasonable. "Justice delayed is justice denied " has more than one meaning.
A mother's incarceration places an immense stress on her family. The great majority of children of prison mothers have to be placed with caretakers other than the father. (The reverse is true for fathers in prison: 80 percent of the children remain with the mother.) If a mother can be separated from her kids less, and if prisons offer effective parenting programs, there will be a lot less damage to society because of a mother's imprisonment.
One memory stands out for me. It was the end of a crowded visiting day at a prison where I was warden. I stood within arms length of an inmate in her mid-20's waiting to say goodbye to her 3 stair-stepped children and their grandparents.
Her youngest child was crying quietly. His mother lovingly picked up the 2 year old. She gently wiped his tears from one cheek, then the other. "Look ," she said. "Momma's wiped your tears away."
Tears streamed from her eyes, too, as she held her childs face close to hers. "Wipe Momma's tears," she said to the boy. With a small closed hand, the wide-eyed toddler wiped her cheeks-first one, then the other, saying nothing, saying everything.
If Congress changes sentencing laws that are not just and that waste countless lives and resources, there would be a million fewer tears to fall, or to be wiped away from the hand of a child.

Joe Bogan served as warden of prisons for men in Rochester, Minn., in Michigan and Florida and a prison for women in Texas during a 30-year career with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Reprinted from the St. Paul Pioneer Press