Even if an inmate's sentence is not oppressively long, their treatment while incarcerated can still constitute subhuman treatment. Prisons are not medical facilities, but they regularly are forced to deal with mental health problems and care for elderly and terminally ill inmates. Food, if it's even edible, usually lacks enough nutrition for inmates' health to not deteriorate. Plus, with a lack of opportunities to see family, read, or gain skill sets, inmates are placed in buildings which lack any resemblance of the civilized world.
“San Francisco will stop charging jail inmates for phone calls and stop marking up the cost of items in the jail store, Mayor London Breed and Sheriff Vicki Hennessy told KQED, a change that will save inmates and their families about $1.7 million a year and, city officials hope, make it easier for them to keep in touch with their families.“
KQED San Francisco
June 12, 2019
Read More“Gascón has endorsed a third option: The jail’s residents, or some of them, could be housed in what his office is calling a behavioral health justice center, meant to divert people from the jail by offering them mental health and substance use disorder treatment.”
The Appeal
December 14, 2018
Read More"There is some evidence that the program helps people stay out of emergency rooms and hospitals: A study in the American Journal of Public Health of 200 chronically ill former inmates in San Francisco, half assigned to a Transitions clinic and half to a primary care program, found that the Transitions patients’ use of emergency rooms was 50 percent lower."
New York Times
May 29, 2018
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