If Jails Can’t Care for Prisoners, Prisoners Should Walk Free
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Prisoners are the ultimate wards of the state, which exerts complete control over every facet of their lives. Among the government’s responsibilities to their most vulnerable charges are its duties to provide inmates with adequate nutrition, housing, security and medical care, the latter of which has been codified by two landmark Supreme Court rulings. In the first of these decisions, Estelle v. Gamble (1972), the Court held that prison authorities who deliberately refuse to address the medical needs of an prisoner constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution and that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the ‘unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain’…proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.” The death of Lashawn Thompson fits this description to a T. While awaiting trial on a misdemeanor case of battery last summer, Thompson, 35, was remanded to Fulton County jail in Atlanta, in the psychiatric wing, because he was behaving erratically. “Three months later Mr. Thompson…
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