Another sad account of modern prison conditions

I just received via e-mail a heads-up about a new book titled “Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison.”  This webpage provides information about the book, including this summary description:

Dying Inside brings the reader face-to-face with the nightmarish conditions inside Limestone Prison’s Dorm 16 — the segregated HIV ward.  Here, patients chained to beds share their space with insects and vermin in the filthy, drafty rooms, and contagious diseases spread like wildfire through a population with untreated — or poorly managed at best — HIV.

While Dorm 16 is a particularly horrific human rights tragedy, it is also a symptom of a disease afflicting the entire U.S. prison system. In recent decades, prison populations have exploded as Americans made mass incarceration the solution to crime, drugs, and other social problems even as privatization of prison services, especially health care, resulted in an overcrowded, underfunded system in which the most marginalized members of our society slowly wither from what the author calls “lethal abandonment.”

This eye-opening account of one prison’s failed health-care standards is a wake-up call, asking us to examine how we treat our forgotten citizens and compelling us to rethink the American prison system in this increasingly punitive age.