The Alaska Department of Corrections is the largest provider of health and behavioral health care in the state and about 4400 Alaskans are under its care. The department is legally required to provide adequate health care to people who are incarcerated.
But Megan Edge with the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, of Alaska said that isn’t happening.
“It's shocking how many basic human needs are not being met,” Edge said. “We've had undiagnosed illnesses that have caused cancer. We have seen people with all sorts of physical disabilities and illnesses and things going on that DOC is not addressing.”
In a class action lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court Thursday, the ACLU claims that the Department of Corrections has failed to provide adequate health care for those in its care and that the failure “creates a substantial risk of serious harm and endangers the health, safety, and lives of incarcerated people.”
The lawsuit asks the state to immediately make changes to their systems to remedy that.
The Department of Corrections declined to comment on the lawsuit, but during an interview last fall, DOC health director Adam Rutherford said it’s an exceptional challenge to provide healthcare for the population.
“We reflect the community, but it's also a concentration of all those highest problems–folks that struggle with addiction, folks that are diagnosed with mental health, the acuity level, the number of folks with [hepatitis] C,” Rutherford said. “So the problems that you see out in the community are concentrated and often magnified here within our system.”
According to the lawsuit, one person wasn’t given glasses for their severe myopia, another was denied care for diabetes and told to simply exercise, and a prisoner with post traumatic stress disorder experiencing night terrors and insomnia was denied sleeping medication. The suit also mentions six people who died in state custody as a result of what the lawsuit describes as inadequate health care.
Kellsie Green is one of those people who died in jail. Green’s father, John Green, said she died of dehydration in a cell while detoxing from opioids.
“The night she died, they put her in a segregated cell by herself,” John Green said. “Someone was told to get her a cellmate. That never happened. and when they came and checked on her in the morning, she was naked underneath the call button, stuck in a position with her hand up where she couldn't reach the call button.”
In 2019 the Green family won a wrongful death claim against the state for Kellsie’s death.
According to the ACLU lawsuit, requesting medical care is an overly complicated process and people who are incarcerated must ask a guard or staff member. The suit said corrections staff discouraged people from formally requesting care, and in several cases at one institution distributed a fake form that asked the “whiner” if they wanted help from their “mommy” for their “sissy” feelings.
The system for requesting medical care through guards and staff is problematic, according to Dr. William Weber, a physician who works for the national nonprofit Medical Justice Alliance. They advocate in court for incarcerated people who can’t access adequate healthcare.
“Guards or other prison staff are not medically trained and and really, from a health privacy standpoint, guards generally should not be privy to information about patients' health, just in the same way you wouldn't talk to the security guard at the hospital about your medical concerns,” Weber said.
He said one of the fundamental challenges for incarcerated people is that they are entirely dependent on the corrections system for their care.
“You can't just go to another hospital. You can't just go to another ER,” Weber said. “You don't have access to the same health care resources–most patients could look online, or most patients could talk to their physician or talk to their friends.”
Edge from the ACLU said that poor healthcare for incarcerated people impacts everyone in Alaska.
“We spend a ton of money on our correctional system,” Edge said. “About 96% of the population goes home one day, and we're not sending them home in good shape. We're sending them home in worse shape than when we booked them. To me, that is a huge sign that our system is absolutely failing.”
Correction: An earlier version of the story incorrectly stated the lawsuit is filed on behalf of at least six people who died under DOC care. The lawsuit doesn’t represent anyone who died in DOC care, but uses their narratives as a way to demonstrate what happens when peoples’ medical needs are not met.
