Four prisoners in Fresno County Jail filed a class action lawsuit Dec. 13 stating that Fresno Sheriff Margaret Mims is violating prisoners’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Mims is accused of maintaining dangerous facilities and failing to provide even basic health care to prisoners.
The four prisoners, Quentin Hall, Robert Merryman, Dawn Singh and Carlton Fields, are seeking an order from the court requiring Sheriff Mims to provide basic health care and protection of prisoners from violence from other prisoners. The four Fresno prisoners’ class action lawsuit against the inhumane conditions forced upon them is, to say the least, heroic. The prisoners are represented by three law firms: the Prison Law Office, Disability Rights California and Cooley LLP.
The lawsuit states that Sheriff Mims and other Fresno County officials have been indifferent to the consequences that the prisoners face as a direct result of an ineffective health care screening process, an ineffective health care request and referral system, delayed access to health care and the delivery of substandard health care.
Another important issue being raised is the fact that with an under-qualified and insufficient health care staff, prisoners with mental health conditions are being put into dungeon-like conditions where correctional officers are treating them with force rather than with care. As shown by the reports from the Consensus Project on Mental Health and Criminal Justice, the majority of people in jail with a mental illness have not committed a serious crime and are instead arrested for displaying symptoms of their untreated mental illness in public.
This mistreatment of prisoners is not uncommon. Jails are used by the ruling class as a repressive apparatus to warehouse working-class people whose crimes are predominantly victimless crimes, mainly relating to property rights, rather than offer them the rehabilitation and basic necessities they need. With a more than 11 percent unemployment rate and many more underemployed in California alone, many of the over 2.5 million people in the prison system are dislocated workers. If the system were to provide jobs with livable wages and education, many of those who broke bourgeois laws would not be there in the first place.
This in turn can only be blamed on one thing: the capitalist system, which generates discrimination and wages a war on poor and low-income working people, who make up half of the country’s population according to the most recent census data.
This system deems offenders of petty wrongdoings as “criminals” and those who actually rob us of health care, education and housing as worthy of high esteem. The crimes of bankers are far greater than the victimless crimes committed by many prisoners. Bankers and CEOs who caused thousands of people to become homeless or jobless in the recession, and war criminals like Barack Obama, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Robert Gates, who are responsible for millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, are free.
Meanwhile, working class people suffer from inadequate health care and inhumane conditions in jails and detention centers.
All progressive people should demand justice for the prisoners in Fresno County Jail and all prisoners held in concentration camps for the poor.
