Prisoners killed by guards in Florida prisons

Baked to Death

In May 2011, Sidney Webb and his mother visited his younger brother Allen in prison. While incarcerated, Robert Allen Webb (his full name) was diagnosed with below average cognitive ability and housed with other developmentally disabled prisoners.

His brother appeared pale and gaunt. Allen asked for a Coca-Cola from a vending machine, which he downed before ordering another and another. Can’t you buy these from the commissary? Sidney asked. Yes, Allen said, but the cans would explode, because it was so hot in his cell. The heat was so severe, in fact, that Allen hinted he might not make it out of prison alive. If he died there, he said, the family should just let the prison bury him — he’d put them through enough.

Sidney waved off his brother’s gloomy talk and promised they’d go fishing when he got out.

A few months later, the news came in a call from a prison chaplain. “I’m sorry to inform you that your brother has passed away,” he told Sidney. Then the chaplain said something unexpected: When Allen’s body was found, it was hot to the touch. The chaplain was sure the heat had killed him and suggested that Sidney investigate.

Looking back, Sidney said, he was naive for not heeding Allen’s warnings. But he reserves his harshest judgment for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “They murdered my brother,” he said.
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Robert Allen Webb had reported dizziness shortly before his death in 2011, after a month that featured 18 days that climbed above 100 degrees.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/10/11/cooking-them-to-death-the-lethal-toll-of-hot-prisons

On its corrections department website, Florida lists the availability of air-conditioning as one of many “misconceptions” about its prison system, along with cable television. “We couldn’t afford to do it if we wanted to,” State Sen. John Whitmire, who chairs the Texas Senate’s criminal justice committee, told an interviewer in 2011 about air-conditioning in prisons. “But number one we just don’t want to.”

Among roughly 150,000 people in Texas prisons, about four in five have no access to air-conditioning in their cells.
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Mentally ill former marine baked to death in New York Prison
- high humidity, lack of adequate ventilation, and interaction with psychiatric medication all factors

Jerome Murdough, “basically baked to death” in his 6'-by-10' cinderblock cell in Rikers Island. According to the AP, Murdough, who was homeless and on anti-psychotropic and anti-seizure medication, had been at Rikers for about a week, after being picked up by police in February on a misdemeanor trespassing charge for sleeping on the roof of a Harlem housing project. On the night he died, Murdough had complained of being overheated. Because he was housed in a special unit for mentally ill inmates, officers were supposed to check on his cell every 15 minutes, but instead he was ignored and left alone. When his cell was finally opened, four hours later, Murdough was already dead, and his internal body temperature and the temperature in his cell were at least 100 degrees.

At Rikers, the proportion of inmates with a diagnosed mental illness has jumped to 40 percent, up from 20 percent just eight years ago, according to the Department of Corrections. Jails are neither designed nor equipped to be mental institutions and, unsurprisingly, locking up people who are in need of psychiatric care has resulted in mayhem. A New York Times investigation into conditions at Rikers Island, published just one day before Murdough’s death was reported, found that at least 12 inmates have been slashed or stabbed since New Year's Eve.
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-are-wretched-hell-holes-for-the-mentally-ill

Both articles go on to state how some of the medications these prisoners are on can make their bodies more vulnerable to excessive heat conditions.


Recovering drug addict dies from withdrawal symptoms after being jailed for failing to pay parking ticket

Macomb County sheriffs picked up Stojcevski in 2014 after he failed to pay a $772 traffic ticket for careless driving. Stojcevski was placed in a jail cell and later a mental health cell, even though a nurse who evaluated Stojcevski suggested putting him in a drug detox unit.

He was supposed to serve 30 days in jail for not paying the ticket. But he would be held there, naked (inmates don't wear clothes in the mental health unit, apparently for their own protection), until his death, 17 days after he was locked up.

Prior to his jail stint, Stojcevski was being treated for his drug addiction with methadone, Xanax, and Klonopin to stave off withdrawal symptoms, which can be deadly. Even a basic knowledge of these drugs and addiction suggests that suddenly yanking Stojcevski off of his medication would cause withdrawal — and that's exactly what happened when jail officials didn't give him the drugs.

Over 17 days, Stojcevski displayed typical withdrawal symptoms. He didn't eat, likely due to withdrawal-induced nausea. He shook and appeared to experience seizures. He seemed to hallucinate, reenacting a previous fight with an inmate. On his last two days, he laid on the floor, shaking and in clear distress.

During all this time, staffers rarely tended to Stojcevski's needs, even though his cell was under surveillance 24 hours a day. As he lay on the floor shaking and not eating his food over 48 hours, no one showed up to help until the very end. But it was too late — he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
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https://www.vox.com/2015/9/26/9399391/macomb-county-jail-david-stojcevski


Latest update about the prisoner who was boiled to death:

There was no question that Darren Rainey died in the showers of the Dade Correctional Institution in 2012. What was unanswered was whether the officers who locked Rainey for two hours in showers that could run as hot at 160 degrees were criminally liable for his death.

That answer came last month, when the state attorney for Miami-Dade County released an "In Custody Death Investigation Close-Out Memo" that attributed Rainey's death to schizophrenia, heart disease, and "confinement inside the shower room." Yet the state attorney declined to press criminal charges against the officers or the prison, saying instead that "the evidence does not show that Rainey's well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff."

The details of Rainey's death are as grisly as they are tragic. Rainey, schizophrenic and heavily medicated, was a resident of Dade's "Temporary Transitional Unit" which houses mentally disabled inmates. According to the report, corrections officers Roland Clarke and Cornelius Thompson took Rainey to the showers after he defecated in his cell and smearing the feces on himself and the cell.

Determining what exactly happened from there depends on whom you believe. Harold Hempstead, an inmate whose cell was below the shower, said he heard much of the incident, including Rainey screaming, "I can't take it anymore!" Another inmate said he heard guards sarcastically ask Rainey "Is it hot enough?" Rainey allegedly screamed, kicked the door, and begged to be let out, before he was found unresponsive almost two hours after he was locked in.

A later investigation found that the water temperature, which could only be controlled from a closet outside the showers, could reach as high as 160 degrees. Mark Joiner, another former inmate at Dade, said guards ordered him to clean pieces of skin that had peeled off Rainey's body from the shower floor. And nurses allegedly said Rainey's body "was covered in burns so severe that his skin came off at the touch," according to the New Yorker.

The Close-Out Memo, on the other hand gave the benefit of the doubt to Thompson and Clarke, who told detectives he made sure the water wasn't too hot. And although a preliminary medical report detailed "visible trauma ... throughout the decedents' body," the final autopsy, not completed until 2016 and yet to be released found no trauma and "no thermal injuries (burns) of any kind on his body."

In the end, the state attorney cited a lack of sufficient and consistent evidence in deciding not to criminally charge any of the officers involved in Rainey's death.
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http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/20...te-was-boiled-to-death-in-florida-prison.html
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article140015793.html

 

Its idiotic that we put all criminals in the same prison and treat them all like child rapist murderous scum. He should have been in a drug rehab facility or mental rehab facility and not a prison. Our system needs an overhaul.