Oklahoma opens its first accessible prison

In a report out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Angel Riggs writes:

Department of Corrections officials this week began moving several of the state's disabled inmates into Oklahoma's first handicapped-accessible prison unit.

The federally funded unit at Joseph Harp Correctional Facility near Lexington will house 262 prisoners. The DOC plans to move in 40 inmates each week until the facility is full.

Dubbed the "ADA facility" because of its compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the unit is accessible for inmates who use wheelchairs and those who are visually impaired.

"We will fill it up extremely quickly," said Justin Jones, DOC director. The state currently has enough inmates who use wheelchairs to fill the unit, he said.

However, the facility also will house inmates being treated for cancer, on dialysis or recovering from major surgeries, Jones said. The prison unit also will accommodate offenders with dementia or those who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

This should concern prisoners' advocates, mental health advocates, disability rights activists, and anyone concerned with segregation, mandatory sentencing that lengthens prisons terms, crime and punishment, and racism in the justice system, that last effecting who gets to grow old in our prisons. Also, it begs the question, exactly how have disabled prisoners been faring these many years if this is Oklahoma's first prison to be made accessible? The answer is that they've not been faring well at all, of course, with conditions many disabled prisoners have faced challenging the standard of avoiding "cruel and unusual punishment."

New Mobility magazine's Jean Stewart covered the appalling conditions of inaccessibility in U.S. prisons almost a decade ago:

Gloria Johnson, for instance, a 43-year-old mother of two who has multiple sclerosis, is imprisoned in Chowchilla, Calif., 140 miles from the facility where Howard Andrews lived and died. Gloria is blind and uses a wheelchair, having lost the use of her arms and legs. When I visited her in January 1997, she was receiving haphazard attendant services, sometimes none at all, despite her inability to perform her own self-care and despite the clear mandate of the ADA and its applicability to the California prison setting.

In staff orders obtained by a journalist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the prison physician wrote regarding Gloria's care: "Do not overly coddle--perhaps deliberately 'delay' calls for bedpan." Gloria reports: "The nurses wouldn't do anything for me. They wouldn't help me eat. From Sunday evening at 8 p.m. to Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., I didn't use the bathroom at all. One night I had to go, so I fell out of bed and tried to drag myself to the bathroom. I didn't make it."

In an administrative complaint Gloria later filed at the prison, she described the kind of care she received: "While on my menstrual cycle last week, I had no choice but to spend hours--sometimes up to eight--in a blood-soaked pad. A couple of times when staff did come and change them and I had soaked through the pad, they did not even change the sheets or my underwear. I have been here 18 days and been given a shower only three times."

And:

Easton Beckford, a paraplegic Jamaican prisoner serving time in an upstate New York prison, fights as doggedly as did Howard Andrews to control his own medical care. When I first met Easton, his wheelchair had been taken from him for months on end, rendering him unable to move from his bed. Both sink and toilet in his cell were inaccessible; Easton frequently soiled himself. As punishment for his complaints about lack of access, he'd been denied permission to use the shower room. Thus forced to take "birdbaths" in his cell, he inevitably spilled water on the floor. As punishment for the spillage, guards would periodically shut off the water in his cell. He was denied necessary catheters and treatment for his pressure sores, without which he was in imminent danger of infection, and his epilepsy medication was randomly withheld.

In a letter to me dated February 2, 1995, Easton outlined his situation. Because his persistent demands for medical care were viewed as a nuisance, he'd been detained in a "strip cell" and deprived of everything--including clothing, mattress and blankets--thus forcing him to lie directly on the metal bunk with two decubiti. "I was left in a strip cell after Dec. 7 to Dec. 24.

The first night I ask the nurse about mattress & blanket her response was 'You're not getting anything to sleep on tonight Beckford because you're not cooperating.' That night I get a roll of toilet paper from the CO [correctional officer] who was working the unit. I spread it out over the bunk as best as I could to guard against the cold steel & using my dreadlocks as a pillow that is how I slept that first night. By the next night I was able to get 2 more roll of toilet paper & I spread them out & get what sleep I could. It went on like that until I made a nest on the bunk out of toilet paper but I'd 2 pressure sores coming out on my hips. I complain about the skin breakdown but no one came to look at them."

Will accessible prisons create more humane treatment for disabled inmates? Perhaps simply eliminating some architectural inaccessibilities will keep disability from being a source of "discipline" for some inmates with impairments, but will separating out disabled prisoners from others create a different kind of institutional bias or neglect? Historically, that's certainly been true of state run facilities housing disabled people.

While it could be argued that finally achieving ADA standards is a success, the state of Oklahoma expects to move 40 inmates per week into the new facility until it is full. By my estimation, the new joint will be overcrowded too in less than six weeks. And that's one facility in one state, with the whole prison population both aging and growing larger. Within the big picture then, the ribbon-cutting for one small "ADA facility" only illustrates the larger failures and human rights issues of the prison industry in the United States as a whole.