Subject:  A mother fights on over prison care |
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Date Posted: 07/ 7/07 5:23pm
A mother fights on over prison care
July 5, 2007
BY JEFF GERRITT
FREE PRESS EDITORIAL COLUMNIST
I wouldn't wish the last year of Theresa Vaughn's life on anyone. But I would like Gov. Jennifer Granholm, state legislators and the people running the Department of Corrections to feel a moment of her pain. Maybe they would feel some urgency to fix the prison health care system that killed her 21-year-old son, Timothy Joe Souders.
Souders, a mentally ill inmate serving one to four years for shoplifting, died of heat and thirst last August at a state prison in Jackson, after spending most of his last four days strapped down in a hot cell, naked and soaked in his own urine.
Two weeks later, his mother found out how he died by reading a story I wrote in the Detroit Free Press. Souders' death was later the subject of a segment on "60 Minutes," which the television news program is scheduled to rebroadcast two weeks from Sunday.
Vaughn's troubles didn't end with her son's death. A week after she learned how he died, Vaughn's 63-year-old father, a Vietnam veteran, succumbed to cancer related to Agent Orange. In January, Vaughn's 61-year-old mother died of congestive lung failure.
Since her son's death, Vaughn, 41, a former factory worker, has been employed off and on in a restaurant and bar while struggling to get medical care for her 20-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy.
Doctors have changed her medications eight times in the last nine months. As she told me Monday, "They don't make a pill for what I'm going through."
Nearly a month ago, Vaughn tried to commit suicide by swallowing 40 sleeping pills. After 24 hours in an emergency room, she stayed five days in a stress unit at Herrick Hospital in Tecumseh, where she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. With only $400 a month from public assistance to pay the rent and other expenses, she was recently evicted from her apartment and moved in temporarily with a girlfriend in Britton, where I met her Monday.
"I was tired of the nightmares," she told me. "I was tired of the crying. I'm tired of people calling my son names. I'm tired of the governor and Legislature not doing what they said they were going to do.
"Nine months later, no one remembers what happened to him."
That's not quite true. Vaughn's Web page,http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/RemoveRestraints, helps maintain Souders as a national symbol of what's wrong with Michigan's prison and mental health systems. The family has hired Geoffrey Fieger's law firm and is suing 36 employees of the Department of Corrections and its private medical services contractor, Correctional Medical Services Inc., over Souders' death. Attorney Paul Broschay of Fieger's firm said the wrongful death lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit and could come to trial within two years.
A similar case, also handled by Fieger's firm, in the death by dehydration of another mentally ill inmate, 39-year-old Jeffrey Clark, brought in May a nearly $3-million verdict against MDOC employees from a federal jury in Lansing.
"With the facts and circumstances surrounding Mr. Souders' case, we expect this verdict to be much higher," Broschay told me Tuesday.
Unfortunately, pressure like this is the only thing the state understands. While admitting mistakes in Souders' death and firing a nurse, it has not acknowledged a serious or systematic problem with prison health care, despite compelling evidence contained in hundreds of pages of court documents.
Following a series I wrote last year, Gov. Granholm ordered an independent review of the system, which should wrap up next month. Incredibly, though, investigators have not interviewed the users of the system, prison inmates, which could cast doubts on any findings, if not discredit them altogether. MDOC has hired a consultant to work with its administrators to improve health care, but little will change until the state's shot-callers acknowledge the problem is serious.
And whatever happened to restoring the Legislature's Corrections Ombudsman Office to provide independent oversight of the system? Both Granholm and state Sen. Alan Cropsey of DeWitt, the Republican leader on prison issues, have told me they support restoring the ombudsman, but neither has the courage or commitment to act. So the idea appears dead. Meantime, the state continues to appeal orders by U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen that would help fix the system.
Still, Vaughn won't give up, and neither should anyone else who wants to clean up this mess. She sees a therapist and goes to group sessions once a week. She continues to work with prisoner advocacy groups such as Prison Legal Services of Michigan and the American Friends Service Committee. She plans to start a charitable foundation in Timothy's name.
The death of her son almost cost Vaughn her life, but it also gave her a voice. I hope someday soon the state will listen.
To see video of Timothy Souders last four days, go to www.aclu.org/prison/mentalhealth/28368res20070214.html.
JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at
jgerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.
Article courtesy of the Detroit Free Press Inc.
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