Sarah Stillman
Appearances
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And in his case, ultimately, the sheriff did apologize when he died to the family, but they had to protest immediately. for almost every day outside the jail. And there's a big community movement kind of speaking up about this in his case, but also a great many others.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, in a shocking number of the lawsuits, records were actively destroyed. In some cases, judges found in regard to some of the companies that records had not just been accidentally discarded, but there were problems with the choice to not retain records, even in the context of litigation where a teenager had died. And so that was a major issue I found.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And then even just trying to get the basics on like who's dying in jails and of what, we found that often when we asked for records, first of all, the jails don't keep good records on the specific category of death. The categories often we found were people were said to have had a quote unquote natural death.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And these were people often in their 30s or 40s or again, even their teens who had died of starvation, which doesn't seem terribly natural, but that's how it's classified most of the time in the records.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
It really runs the gamut. I mean, I found a case in Florida of a young person in his 20s that was classified as a suicide and the cause of death was described as fasting. And in other cases, as I mentioned, sometimes it is actually found to be a homicide because these people were in the care of a facility that didn't care for them.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And then in other cases, it is listed as exactly what it was, but classified as natural. So it really, you see the full range.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I believe so. It makes a difference, too, to what the public knows and doesn't know. I mean, I think we haven't really understood this to be a pattern for quite some time because it's hard to surface it.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I think there's many, many more cases than we know of because many of the cases I was able to find I found through the painstaking process of looking for litigation and doing these record searches. But one has to imagine there's many cases we never find out about. Because people like the main woman I wrote about, Mary Casey, she actually died in hospice care, not in the actual jail itself.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So she would never be counted as a jail death. And I think it's also important to note, I mean, most of these cases are people who the jail wasn't always the one depriving them of food and water. I mean, much of the time it was people who just were being untreated for their mental health issues, often placed in solitary and ceasing to eat, which I think it's not intuitive to many people.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And it wasn't intuitive to me when I began that that's actually a common, predictable symptom of certain mental health disorders. Because they believe that the food may be poisoned or... Also because of severe depression, because of all the things that happen to you when you're placed in solitary.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, I talked to this one professor, Craig Haney, who's an expert on these things across many decades. And he does a lot of jail visits. And he said, look, you have to imagine that even as a healthy person, he goes into many of these solitary cells and instantaneously gets overwhelmed by the despair of it. And so you can imagine if you already have a preexisting mental health issue, you're
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
that it could be a place where you might cease to have any hope and any will. And that can sometimes include the will to want to take care of yourself and want to eat and to drink.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, you know, it's interesting to me. I was looking back the other day at the original email they'd written me to pitch me on this story.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I realized they'd actually pitched it as a story about how many people are deprived of their right to get a hearing before a judge simply because they're actually being detained, often because they're being criminalized for being homeless or because they're being criminalized for a mental health issue. And then they're not being treated.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so they're decompensating and being in a situation where the jailers then say they can't bring them to court because they're not mentally well enough. So it's this weird paradox where people are falling into this bizarre legal black hole and not having their right to go to trial or go to a hearing with a judge. So that's how it was actually brought to me.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, Mary, like many of the people I wrote about for this piece, was a very vibrant and very loved person. She had a life with two kids who she loved dearly. She was always the kind of very nurturing mother who would sew their Halloween costumes by hand. And at some point as she got older, she developed some serious mental health issues and slid into addiction.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And at the end, they mentioned, you know, and she starved to death. And to me, of course, my eyes popped out and I said, OK, she's starved? Like that was just was shocking to me. So I thought, OK, yeah, I'll look into this. And I thought I'd just write a short piece about Mary. And that was my intention. But then I started digging and found another case like that and then another case.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And it turned out that firm alone had actually taken on a bunch of starvation and dehydration death cases. So, yeah, that was a complete shock to me that there were so many cases to uncover. So many more I still haven't uncovered.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, I really, really respected that the head of that company, Brad McLean, was willing to talk with me.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I thought he made some really important arguments about the fact that he does seem to believe that it's important that people get mental health care in their communities first before they're even sent to jail and that they provide it once they're in jail and actually have the resources to do so. I think what's devastating is that it's just hard to look at so many instances where this
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
did happen, again, not just with NAFCARE, but also many other companies. And also some counties that didn't privatize also had these deaths. And so it's sometimes hard to figure out how to bridge the disconnect between the rhetoric around the care we as a society want to provide and the rhetoric many of these corporations say they are committed to providing and then
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I'm seeing these outcomes in what I recognize is a very, very, very hard environment in which to do this work, because, again, I think that's the fundamental core problem here is the wrong decision to be criminalizing people for their mental health issues and keeping them detained far too long pretrial.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Because, again, the record-keeping is so bad to begin with on this type of death, I think we don't really have clear data on that. But I think what we do know is that a wealth-based detention system fundamentally ends up discriminating against people not on the basis of anything other than their wealth.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so in assessing whether someone should be locked up for so long, I mean, we're also just paying a tremendous amount of the society to lock people up for their mental health issues and again, on things that judges, once the people get their day in court, often wind up dismissing or giving a lesser charge to anyway.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So I think if we could find other systems, even at the front end for dealing with police calls, I mean, I think one thing that's being explored very productively is that the alternative to locking someone up in such an instance could be having a mental health team arrive and instead of armed officers who are not
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
necessarily trained to help someone in the midst of a mental health crisis, having people for whom that is their expertise be the ones responding, I think, can also really help this issue at the front end before someone's even facing the question of whether they can afford cash bail.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I think it's a story that many, many people can relate to. And shockingly, by the time she was in her 60s, she often found herself unhoused. And she actually wound up in the Pima County Jail because of a probation violation tied essentially to being unhoused because she had to register her address and she didn't have one.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
this one's going to haunt me for a long time um i think in part because it's so many layers of our collective failure and i wish it could just be one thing that i my intention was to set out finding one thing that we could change and instead i found this cascade of things i mean starting with like why are so many people unhoused and what would it really take to address that and
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
One of the things I'm most drawn to in journalism is, you know, in a world of just so many overwhelming and intractable social problems, it does feel like there's times when you see things where there's just a very clear room for change.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I think when it comes to the idea that, like, yes, it's hard to figure out how do we truly address the roots of the mental health crisis we're in, but it feels like a thing I've Deeply believe is doable is ensuring that people are not dying. Teenagers, elderly folks, all kinds of folks of starvation and dehydration in our county jails and our own communities.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I feel like having communities take a closer look at what's happening in spaces that have been kind of held from the public's eyes to some of the most vulnerable communities. people who deserve the most rudimentary treatment at the very least. I really do feel like that is something we are societally capable of in this moment and something that I hope reporting can be a part of bringing about.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Basically, it means that people can be, in many states, prosecuted for murder, and in some cases, first-degree murder, if they were along in the commission of a felony where someone died, even if that was not their intention. So to break that down, what that could mean and does mean in some places is that... Some teenagers broke into a house and thought they were going to steal an Xbox.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And the police arrived at the scene and shot one of the kids. And another of the young people there was charged with the murder of the friend that the police had actually shot and killed. So the basic idea is to hold people accountable for knowing they went into dangerous situations. But it can lead to surprising stretches of what we think of the concept of murder as meaning.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, so I wrote about the case of a young man named Sadiq Baxter in Florida, and he had made the bad decision to go out gambling with his friend. And he and the friend had, after losing a bunch of money, gone and started to jostle the car handle doors of unlocked vehicles and take loose change. They took a drum set. They took a number of other things from these unlocked cars.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
A neighbor called the police, and Sadiq was actually arrested and placed in handcuffs. And he thought that would be that. And it turned out his friend had been around the corner in his vehicle and had tried to flee the scene when the cops arrived.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And he wound up being chased in a high-speed chase by law enforcement and ultimately miles away from where Sadiq was wound up tragically hitting and killing two bicyclists. And it turned out that Sadiq then wound up being prosecuted on two counts of first-degree murder, which it's important to note in Florida carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
She had struggled with schizophrenia and she had a diagnosis also of bipolar disorder. So very common things that so many families struggle with.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Exactly. So he really believed he was innocent of the charge of murder. He immediately accepted that he had done a wrong thing by taking from the unlocked cars. So he pled guilty on that charge, which in Florida actually did carry, I believe it was something like 25 years or something of the sort. So it was already a quite lengthy sentence there.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And he thought, OK, I'll take the other part of this, the murder part, to trial. But it turned out he didn't realize the way felony murder works. It actually meant that the judge basically said, my hands are tied. Like, you, you know, pled to this felony. And that means that you are de facto guilty of first degree murder, since that's the way the felony murder doctrine works in Florida.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So the judge in the sentencing stage said, really, I don't think there's anything I can do. You just are going to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, but actually one of the main things that drew me to Sadiq's story was really actually the children of one of the victims, Dina Malkin, who sounds like he was just a truly remarkable person. And he had these three kids who had a really wonderful relationship with him who were obviously incredibly devastated when their dad died.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
But then what they told me was that they were even further devastated when Sadiq They found out that two other people were also going to be losing their children in another way, which is going to prison for life for the death.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
So Ian Amalkin, the son of Dean Amalkin, actually spoke with me in depth, as did his two sisters, really describing how they felt the sentence for Sadiq and O'Brien, the other person who was sent to prison for life for this, was just terrible. not only unjust, but also just another source of pain for them. It wasn't what they wanted to see in coping with the grief of losing their father.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, that's right. They're a very unusual, very smart and compassionate family. So I think they really stand out to me having, you know, written a letter to the judge on Sadiq's behalf and really clearly articulating their stance as people who know the legal system and saying, like, we really think this is an overextension of what is appropriate.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I've been amazed that all around the country there are movements. And again, sometimes those movements among the voices within them are actually the families of the victims who've been speaking up, saying like this, we don't believe this serves us. This is not our sense of justice.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Minnesota, I met some really incredible mothers whose daughters have been incarcerated on these charges for something, a murder that they themselves did not commit, that they had no idea was going to take place. These two moms, Linda and Tony, they knew nothing about the criminal justice system. One of them was working as a real estate agent. They were just living their lives.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Their daughters were quite young and had gone along on a situation where they had suffered a lot of trauma in high school. They had wound up using drugs. Someone had, I believe, like taken some drugs from them and they went with some guys to try to get it.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
back or something along those lines and then when they arrived at the house one of the guys they'd gone with wound up suddenly becoming violent and they themselves were terrified and this man ended up killing one of the guys there and the girls who had had no idea that was going to happen and who were actually being threatened in the process and who were scared for their own lives they wound up being due to the felony murder doctrine prosecuted for and found guilty of murder tell us about minnesota because they've they've made made some changes right
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah. So those the two moms I just mentioned, they did a lot of work. And then I think last year they brought about a significant legislative change that actually got their own daughters out of prison and also many other people who are in the process of appealing their convictions based on that change.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And they got bipartisan support for that bill because it is an issue that I found there is a lot of room across political divides to make changes around.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, I think it does make a lot of intuitive sense that people need to be held accountable for the things they do and the cascade of events that can unfold when you choose to engage in something dangerous. I think the question is, is our current system as it's set up,
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
pushing, due to these hyper-punitive sentences that really kind of came out of the war on drugs era, these crackdowns of such extreme sentences, even just the construct of mandatory life in prison without parole, without any capacity to have discretion about what really took place, what really was the fact pattern at play here.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, her son Carlin was completely shocked. He saw a woman who looked utterly different than when he had last seen her just a few months before. She was essentially just, as he described it, skin and bones. She was extremely thin. She was wearing a diaper.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I think most people who look at a case like Sadiq's think that it is not serving us as a society, even just the costs alone to incarcerate a man for the his family for something that he was not even present for. It just doesn't really ring as justice to most people that I've spoken with across the aisle, really.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, he learned at the very beginning of the process, right? When he got locked up pre-trial, there was a man, Eric Redeemer, who was there in another jail cell who decided to basically offer almost like a law class inside the jail where he was showing, here's how I fought my case. Here's how you can fight your case.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so Sadiq became very disciplined about studying the law, studying his rights and bringing these legal filings. So when I first found him, I mean, I found a lot of handwritten legal filings because he doesn't have access to all the different legal resources that you or I might have as a free person.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
But he would systematically each day go to the law library and download what he could get and come up with legal theories. And he's still pushing and he has been for years. And now he finally does have a shot.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Another wild thing about our system is that we really do not, as a public, have a transparent window into who is locked up for what and why. I would have thought that's one of the more basic pieces of information in the criminal justice system. But what I found in looking at felony murder, I thought, I very naively thought at the beginning, oh, I'll just file some FOIA requests.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
I'll get these public records. I'll find out how many people are locked up across America on a felony murder conviction. Instead, what I found is many states said they kept no records on this. Many states like Florida, they would actually change the charge on the books. So if you look at what Sadiq was originally charged with, it says, you know, first degree felony murder.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
But then when you are convicted, it just becomes first degree murder. So a lot of the people I spoke to who were incarcerated on this charge also felt just like the pain of knowing that when someone looks at their case, it looks like they made an intentional decision to murder, which is, I think, what most of us think the word murder means. But in the records... That's simply not how it's kept.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
She just was unrecognizable and looked like she had aged many years, which, of course, prompted the question for him of, like, what on earth happened to you? And he decided he was going to investigate and try to get to the bottom of it.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And we do not have any idea how many people are in for this charge, but it's a great many.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, the way they felt is that in the state of Florida, there's a great degree of emphasis put on what victims' families want. And interestingly, actually, Ian Amalkin said to me he actually didn't think that was the way justice should be administered. That's one of the sons, right?
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
If that's how Florida feels, then I hope they'll take my feelings into consideration because he felt as if sometimes the prosecutor wanted a particular outcome. And if he was willing to say that thing, then he was useful to them. And if he had a different thing to say as the victim of this particular harm, then he felt unheard.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And I think I've talked to many victims' families who felt that way and wish their voices were taken more into account.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
In a world of many just complex things regarding our criminal justice system, I think there's a lot of people who've made very good arguments for the idea that felony murder could simply be abolished altogether or narrowed in ways that make it much more accountable to what most of the public would perceive as justice.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So they really started digging into the jail conditions. And what they found is that many people who have mental health disorders, including Mary, when they're put in these kinds of conditions, they become really terrified and sometimes have fears that their jailers are trying to poison them and they cease to eat.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so Mary, although when she had arrived, she had immediately articulated that she is someone who needs psychiatric medications, at least as far as we understand it from the documents. But she didn't receive those, didn't receive at the start any chance to see a psychiatrist or get the kind of treatment that she needed and waited quite some time for that.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Again, mind you, she's waiting there actually pre-trial, like the vast majority of the people that arrived. I reported on for this piece and wound up not being brought to many of her jail hearings because of the fact that she had psychologically decompensated, which was actually how this piece was initially pitched to me.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
The attorneys had brought it to me saying many, many people are being deprived of their civil rights by virtue of the fact that they're being detained pre-trial for things they haven't even yet been found guilty of and then not being brought to their court hearings because they're They're having mental health issues that they're not being treated for in the jail.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so people in the jail are determining that they can't even bring them to the hearing to get them out. Because so many of these people had charges that ultimately would have been dropped, as was ultimately the case for Mary when a judge saw her months later looking emaciated.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So ultimately, the very sad reality that I didn't know when I began reporting this is that if you've not eaten for many months or been dehydrated for many months, oftentimes medically you can't fully be revived. So the doctors met and made the decision that there was nothing that could actually bring Mary back to capacity and decided she could be released to hospice care to die.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
So ultimately, the autopsy ruled it a death by protein calorie malnutrition, as you said. Which was a term I'd never heard. I mean, the really sad thing for me in reporting this was just learning so many of these terms that pertain to people who, because of being malnourished or dehydrated in the jails, died of a whole slew of causes that could have been so easily prevented.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Unlike, you know, I think so often about we've heard about police violence of the sort that happens in an instant or in a moment. Like we think about George Floyd. And then I also now have a new category in my brain.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
That's these types of deaths that happen across many weeks or months even where everyone is looking and seeing a person grow more and more frail and not take their food trays day after day and still be allowed essentially to waste away.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, it's a big set of intersecting histories, I think, because we've got the big history of deinstitutionalization. So people may be familiar with the idea that for a long time, many Americans who were struggling with mental health issues were held in psychiatric facilities that were often also very heinous conditions without the right kind of treatment.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And there was a rightful outcry about that. And then Instead of finding a genuine solution to the problem, what we decided to do as a country is make a big sweeping promise that we would take people out of these facilities and then provide actual mental health care in communities. And then that type of community care never really got resourced.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And instead, what we did is take off on the trajectory of mass incarceration. So seeing the increase of criminalizing people for being poor, criminalizing people for their addictions.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And so at that same time that we saw many, many people released from these psychiatric asylums that had been abusive, they basically just got re-swept up in the net of county jails and prisons and other places that weren't really well equipped to heal or even remotely address the realities of mental health.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Exactly. And I think many people don't know about the difference between a prison and a jail. A jail typically having been designed to be a short passing through space while you're either serving out a short sentence or awaiting trial.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And what we've seen also in this time period is just a massive surge in pretrial detention, people waiting sometimes not just months, but literally years just to have their day in court and people with mental health issues waiting.
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they've found have a much greater chance of spending quite some time in these facilities, which, as you can imagine, are one of the worst places to try to get mentally well. And to the contrary, especially for the folks of whom there are many who are put in solitary confinement or other very isolated conditions. We all know the facts of that.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
It's not surprising to hear that that is not a way to mentally heal.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
I think there are a lot of factors there. One is just a big sweeping trend in American life to increasingly privatize services that might fundamentally be public ones. And I think the provision of actual care, mental health care and medical care in jails is a good example of where introducing a profit motive can be problematic. I mean, I've come to view it as quite complicated.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
I don't think it's as simple as many of the people who work on this have told me. It's not as simple as just eliminating privatization from the sphere and everything would be fine. I mean, I don't think county sheriffs are terribly well incentivized either to provide really quality mental health care, even though our communities are incentivized to have that.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Because, you know, if we actually treated this moment as a chance for public health intervention instead of as a chance to incarcerate, I think the outcomes for communities would be good. But in the context of the privatization process,
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
A lot of what many of the lawyers I spoke to have argued is that they've seen the way the contracts are constructed as contracts that have essentially a capped cost so that any further money they spend on care of incarcerated people becomes money out of their own pocketbook. You can imagine how that would incentivize things like the tremendous understaffing I saw while reporting on this issue.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, the law firm to whom they went, they had sued this company before, as have many others, because there's been quite a range of jail deaths tied to negligence as well as other kinds of medical health crises. In fact, just in this past month, there was a big settlement reached in regard to someone in a Washington state jail who basically had his leg cut.
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rotting off and it wasn't treated or attended to. So they found a law firm, Budgenhype in Seattle, that had done a lot of jail death litigation. Because I think it's really important to emphasize it's not just NAFCARE. I mean, there's quite a number of companies operating in this space.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And many of these companies have been providing care in instances where there was actually deaths of pretty astonishing neglect.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, in her intake form, there was supposed to be, as the lawyers saw it, a space for the medication she'd previously been on. And she did articulate her need for those, but simply just didn't see a mental health provider in a timely fashion. And she's not, of course, the only one at that jail who needed such services.
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A lot of those positions went unstaffed for basically the majority of time that Mary was in the jail. And I should say, too, the lawyers who are representing the family, they had worked on many of these cases.
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And a lot of them involved much younger people, like literally in one case, an 18-year-old, Mark Moreno, whose story really stood out to me because it was really a story of how we criminalize people for their mental health issues instead of providing the treatment at the front end. This was a young kid whose father had actually taken him to a local mental health clinic.
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During the midst of a serious episode, Mark had been like talking to angels and was clearly in the throes of something. And instead of receiving treatment there, what happened is that he was turned over to police who were supposed to take him to the hospital. And instead, they found that he had two misdemeanor warrants for traffic violations.
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And based on those misdemeanor warrants, he was instead taken to the county jail where he wound up dying eight days later of dehydration. So it could happen not just to someone like Mary in her 60s, but also to teenagers, multiple teenagers.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, one of the lawyers did warn me in sending me a video. He said, you know, this will stain your brain. And that was an accurate statement for sure. I mean, it was the kind of slow motion harm that is just unlike anything I've seen before. Just watching people who are in very profound distress, sometimes seeking help and not receiving it.
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And then correlating that to or cross-checking that against the documentation often at these sites, which sometimes had jail staff or medical staff saying that they were checking in on someone every day, that they looked totally fine and it was okay. And in fact, in some cases, they were literally already dead.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
So I think about Larry Price in Arkansas who died in solitary confinement and the essential alleged fabrication of records where you see all these jail cell checks that say that he was doing fine and he's literally there in his cell, no longer alive, having starved.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, a really alarming thing to me was places where this was pretty widespread. So I think about the Fulton County Jail, where President Trump was actually booked in. And that very same jail, we have seen well documented that in the mental health ward, 90% of the people were malnourished.
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And according to the private health care company's own records, internally, 100% of the people were essentially affected by some type of insect infestation or some type of parasite. So, yeah, I mean, in some cases, I found cases where people were literally, the autopsy report showed people who had rat bites on them and There was lice. There was scabies.
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I mean, I have to be honest, when they brought me this story, I thought, I don't know if this is where I really want my mind to be. And then I really thought, I don't want to live in a world where we don't care and notice and take the time to document and listen when this has happened to someone. And sadly, it's not just someone. It turns out it's a great many people.
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You know, I think I can stand behind that 100 percent and I wish I couldn't. But the sad thing, having seen so many of these videos and looked so closely at these cases, I think what I've seen again and again is that in some of them it actually was ruled homicide because of that specific type of long scale neglect.
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Every day someone was coming in and noticing this person hadn't had a drink of water. In some cases, in cases that were found homicides, the people actually at the jail had shut the water off to the cell. I mean, I'm thinking about a young man named Keaton Ferris. He grew up right near where my parents live. My parents live on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington State.
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It's a really beautiful place. And Keaton really loved it. He always was writing on social media about his love of the ocean and of nature. And then he wound up in a jail in the midst of a mental health crisis where the jail officials actually cut the water off to his cell for four days.