Sarah Stillman
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
It's not surprising to hear that that is not a way to mentally heal.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
And many of these companies have been providing care in instances where there was actually deaths of pretty astonishing neglect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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