According to one of four PHS officers, who agreed to speak to USA Today anonymously due to retaliation fears, the psychical therapy program at one institution was temporarily shut down because of reassignments and other staff shortfalls.
As a federal inmate who has had recurring bladder cancer for 12 years and has been in 6 federal institutions over the course of 19 years, I can attests that this practice is nothing new. It is actually common practice for doctors, nurses, securities, psychologists and those whose primary jobs have nothing to do with security work. However, the fact of the matter is that all staff working inside federal institutions are considered “correctional officers” (C.O.) first, a point that BOP spokesman Justin Long expressed in a letter to USA Today.
“When an insufficient number of correctional officers are available to cover an institutions critical custody posts on any given shift” Mr. Long wrote,” institutions rely on overtime and reassignments of other institution staff, including PHS officers, who are all considered correctional workers to cover such posts.”
I first became aware that all PHS officers and health care providers were considered C.O.’s first back in 2007 at a Federal Medical Center in North Carolina. On the terminally-ill ward, or fifth floor of said institution, a nurse who was uncomfortable working security informed me that she would be working third-shirt (midnight until 8am) as “guard”, a duty she despised. “I am not a guard, ” she explained to me and my dying friend Joseph Russo. “I hate being forced to do this shit.”
Thomas Viscante, an inmate currently serving 57-months for bank robbery, has a medical history that includes COPD, Asthma, Lupus, Diabetes and Congenital Heart Failure. At the same prison in Indiana in which I am currently incarcerated, “Tom,” as he’s known, explained to me that while at a prison in North Carolina he watched nurses and psychologists work the second and third-shift
“For weeks, the institution was short-staffed and they had all of these broads working in the units, and I would sit there at night and see all of them read our out-going mail at night and watch them laugh,” Viscante said. “I think they have to be trained to do that, don’t they? It’s right in the BOP Program Statement that they must be properly trained .”
In fact, the policy Tom is referring is P.S. 5265.14. While it does not specify who can or cannot process mail, it does make clear that the staff member at least have knowledge of what to look for when screening the mail, and does make clear that staff must take into consideration inmates private lives and treat their mail accordingly.
Jesse Jeffrey Cox is another inmate who is currently serving time at the same institution as Tom and I. A chronically-ill inmate who has type-2 Diabetes, Chronic Hypertension, Cardiac Arrhythmias and Chronic derangement of the knee, he has been incarcerated within the BOP “close to 16 years and says it’s “gone to shit.”
“Reports have recently come out saying that some medical prisons are shorted staffed medical personal by as much as 40%, Said Cox. “How can they properly meet our needs when they have nurses running around playing cops?”
Serving 210-months imprisonment for drug charges, Cox is due to be released in 2017.
“Who knows what I’ll face out there as far as medical treatment, but at least I won’t have to rely on a bunch of bitter-people who have been trained to hate first, and care for inmates second.”