Tasers and another fatality
Sex and the Saddle
“Why don’t you reporters simply tell the truth?” a frustrated public official once asked me.
Whenever I hear a question like that, I think about an incident that happened when I was a young reporter at The Tulsa Tribune in Oklahoma and a woman called and told me that she needed my help.
She said her husband was in prison and that she was being sexually harassed by a high -ranking prison official. She claimed this man had threatened to have her husband beaten unless she did what the official wanted sexually.
Crisis Care Centers vs ERs
The first time Mike became psychotic, I drove him to a hospital emergency room. We didn’t know any psychiatrists and Mike needed immediate help. Taking him there turned out to be a mistake.
Emergency rooms are where everyone goes nowadays whenever they have any kind of health-related crisis, but many are poorly equipped to deal with psychiatric patients in the midst of a mental break.
Some patients are turned away, as Mike and I were, without getting help. Or a patient might be held down and given a shot of Haldol or another strong anti-psychotic that will help stabilize him but also can turn him into a walking zombie for days.
Is Solitary Confinement Cruel?
Is being confined indefinitely in a solitary prison cell “cruel and unusual punishment” and does it violate a prisoner’s right to due process?
A team of students at the University of Denver Strum School of Law and two of their professors claim the answer to both questions is yes. In 2007, they filed a civil rights lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on behalf of a familiar name: Thomas Silverstein.
Silverstein is a major character in my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, and someone I have known since 1987. That’s when I became the first and – to date — the only reporter ever allowed to interview him in prison.