Toothache? I don’t know about you, but I go to the dentist and not the florist. I don’t call my surgeon. For a haircut nor do I go through the Wendy’s Drive through and ask them to do my taxes for me. So you will have to forgive me if I don’t place a high level of confidence in professional medical opinions of law enforcement agencies as to how address issues arising out of a combination of incarceration and disability.
I am not alone in this assessment as a similar conclusion was also reached by the United States Supreme Court in 1998 when they heard Pennsylvania V. Yeskey and ruled unanimously that Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) covers inmates in state prisons and local jails.
Ronald Yeskey was a prison inmate sentenced to 18 to 36 months in a Pennsylvania correctional facility. The sentencing court recommended his placement in Pennsylvania’s Motivational Boot Camp for first-time offenders. Successful completion would have led to release on parole in just six months. Because he had a medical history of hypertension, admission to the program was denied. He sued, alleging that his exclusion violated the ADA.
Ronald Yeskey was a prison inmate sentenced to 18 to 36 months in a Pennsylvania correctional facility. The sentencing court recommended his placement in Pennsylvania’s Motivational Boot Camp for first-time offenders. Successful completion would have led to release on parole in just six months. Because he had a medical history of hypertension, admission to the program was denied. He sued, alleging that his exclusion violated the ADA.
The phrasing of Title II is not ambiguous. It clearly states: “[N]o qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity.”
Disabled prisoners pose special problems compared with the general prison population and prison administrators must confront a broad range of disabilities. The disabled may include the wheelchair bound, the blind, the hearing impaired, the mentally retarded and mentally ill, and persons with an array of medical conditions including HIV and Hepatitis. Moreover, administrators must deal with the tension between the ADA’s individualized approach to accommodating disabilities and the needs of prison security and administration.
Another important consideration for local governments is that the ADA’s provisions also affect pretrial detainees. Bell v. Wolfish, 441, the leading case on the rights of pretrial detainees, suggests little practical difference between pretrial detention and post-conviction incarceration. This suggests that ADA claims of pretrial detainees are likely to result no differently than those of prison inmates.
Thus Municipalities and local law enforcement agencies face two immediate issues, the first is to acquaint elected officials with the need to bring their corrections facilities into compliance with Title II. The second is to acquaint corrections managers and staff with the needs and rights of the disabled inmate population. Full implementation of the ADA in state prisons and local jails is a complex but important task as the consequences of not doing will provoke a whirlwind of lawsuits.
But Correctional facilities across the country routinely flout the Americans with Disabilities Act, subjecting thousands of inmates with physical and mental health problems to painful and often times degrading conditions including refusing medications, unnecessary segregation in violation of numerous DOJ Regulations and Court rulings requiring that programs and actives be administered in the most integrated setting.
In 2015, Inmates Ronaldo Ligons and Barry Michaelson sued the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Ligons and Michaelson suffered from a deadly viral disease called Hepatitis C . Prior to 2013, the standard treatment for Hepatitis C was injections of interferon. The method had significant and debilitating side effects and a low rates of success. In December 2013, the Food and Drug Administration approved several drugs that were lauded by both the Association for the study of infectious disease and the association for the study of liver diseases as medical breakthroughs.
Despite changes in policy from the Federal bureau of prisons, the Center for Disease control For non-medical reasons the Minnesota Department of corrections, refused to provide the breakthrough medical treatment.
The ADA requires that prisons provide “reasonable accommodations” for disabled people, such as grab bars, wheelchair ramps, and special adaptations in educational or treatment-related programs for inmates who are deaf or have a cognitive disability. Inmates aren’t supposed to be put in solitary confinement simply because there are no accessible cells available or because officers just don’t feel like dealing with providing the necessary accommodations as prescribed by law.
For the 31 percent of inmates in state prisons nationwide who report having a physical or cognitive disability, abuse and neglect are common features of prison life and the situation is only expected to get worse as the U.S. prison population ages. Incarcerated people are three or four times more likely to report having a disability than the rest of the U.S. population.
John Woodatch, who headed the disability rights section of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division from its inception in 1995 until 2011, said most of the thousands of annual complaints the office received were from prisoners and that nearly all of them were substantiated. Woodwatch stated in a recent interview that “Every complaint we got from those people were legitimate complaints,” he continued on to describe the conditions in US Correctional facilities as a “ a litany of discrimination against people with disabilities.”
For the 31 percent of inmates in state prisons nationwide who report having a physical or cognitive disability, abuse and neglect are common features of prison life and the situation is only expected to get worse as the U.S. prison population ages. Incarcerated people are three or four times more likely to report having a disability than the rest of the U.S. population.
John Woodatch, who headed the disability rights section of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division from its inception in 1995 until 2011, said most of the thousands of annual complaints the office received were from prisoners and that nearly all of them were substantiated. Woodwatch stated in a recent interview that “Every complaint we got from those people were legitimate complaints,” he continued on to describe the conditions in US Correctional facilities as a “ a litany of discrimination against people with disabilities.”
Woodatch’s concerns were shared by Justice Scalia in his opinion in Pennsylvania Dept of Corrections v. Yeskey in which he explained that the ADA was designed to remedy the serious and pervasive disability-based discrimination that exists throughout society as documented by Congress when the ADA was enacted. It was intended to ensure equal protection of the rights of all persons with disabilities, including prisoners according to the Supreme Court, and to relegate the existence of a disability to a non-issue.
The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part, “No State [can] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Fourteenth Amendment, in conjunction with the ADA, ensures that prisoners with disabilities have the means with which to protect their rights because YES! People with disabilities have rights too
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