Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 848: Starved in Jail

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Why are incarcerated people dying from lack of food or water, even as private companies are paid millions for their care?

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political.

And there is no welcome mat. Today is the day you're hearing this. It's going to be long form day. And so we're recording it. We're recording this, you know, maybe far in the past, maybe just like a week or so in the past. We're not sure when this is going to release. We have no idea.

This is one of those sort of bank episodes we're putting together because it's while it is timely, it's also timeless. Unfortunately, which is very unfortunate. And this is, we're covering a story from the New Yorker called Starved in Jail. And before we get started, let me just do a little trigger warning for people. This article is exactly what I just said.

It's people who starve to death in jail. So it's very disturbing. It's really upsetting. It's people who starve to death in jail. So it's very disturbing. It's really upsetting. It's not good. And I understand there's a group of people, I think, that might hear that and immediately say, I can't do it, I can't do it. And I understand that.

I empathize with you, right? But I also think that if you can find it in yourself to have fortitude to listen to it, to have fortitude to listen to it, to have fortitude to read this article. You're honoring the memory of those people by carrying this with you and maybe telling another person, maybe telling just one other person about it. Because if you don't, if you, if you, if you shut it off, which again, I understand and I get, and I understand that I get it.

If you don't listen, who will? Right? If you can't, if you, and I understand you can't, you might not be able to. And I encourage you, if you don't think you have it in you, don't listen to the show. Turn the show off and maybe when you have it in you at a later date, come back and listen. If you'll never have it in you,

forget the show exists, it's fine, right? It's okay. But if you think you can gird up and you think you can handle it, read the article. If you think you can, because I think that really, if you can carry it with you and you can, while one day you're going through and you're saying, you know what, I'm going to donate to Chicago coalition for the homeless today, because I remember this article and there was a lot of people who are unhoused in it and they were treated really badly. And that to me means that I should try to help those people or I'm going to donate to one of these organizations that helps people reform prisons, or I'm going to donate to

one of these organizations that helps people that, you know, get the mental help they need to try to survive. Those are important places. And this might help you in the future. And you might turn other people onto this podcast or this story. And that might, it might change them to try to help because the government's not coming to help. The government's making this problem. So it's, I just want to, I just want to employ you. If you can find it in yourself to fight through this episode and listen to really horrible shit, I'd like you to stay.

I also, I would echo and add to that that, I think that in order for us to become more empathetic people, we have to recognize our responsibility to know things. Now we don't all share that responsibility equally, right? So I don't wanna say you, specific listener out there, you have a personal responsibility, but I'm saying broadly, socially, we cannot build empathy without recognizing

our broad social responsibility to know true and unpleasant things about the world. And so if you are part of that cohort that can intake this information without taking personal damage, then I think that helps to build the empathy that we need in order to make good humanitarian decisions. Yeah. So let's get started with the article itself. So the article itself is called Starved in Jail, and it follows one family's plight.

Yeah. This woman goes through a psychotic break. Um, and she's had many in her life where she's wound up in, in jail because of it. Now let's start there with. We have a system in this country that does not differentiate between someone who's having a psychotic break and says those people need a different kind of help. We put those people in jail often. We don't have enough space or enough places or enough discernment

to put them in a right spot where they belong to get the help they need. Instead, we task jails with this. And often we're going to find out as we work our way through, they're either for profit and don't care, for profit and underfunded, or government funded and don't care, or government funded and underfunded. So that what happens is is that the people that go in there don't get the help they need, and then suffer greatly. In this article, they call it torture. And it is, if you read this article,

you'll find out it's torture. It's torture. The problem of incarcerating people who need mental health services instead is a direct result of intentional political funding choices when institutions like mental health institutions direct result of intentional political funding choices when institutions like mental health institutions were shut down. And when those institutions were shut down,

what was supposed to happen was that they were supposed to have been replaced by a broad network of community outreach centers and other like local resources, mental health resources. The problem is that they shut down, this is the problem we're seeing in government now, they shut down and saved money by closing all these mental health facilities,

inpatient typically mental health facilities, many of which had appalling problems to be fair. But then they did not do the second part. They did not fund and put into place a broad national network of local community-based mental health care facilities. And so what happened is an enormous number of people in desperate need of mental health care services

became unhoused, became uncared for, found themselves in and out of the revolving door system that doesn't recognize and appreciate the difference between what are almost always petty crimes. These are like the most fucking nothing burger crimes you've ever heard of. And somebody who is committing those crimes,

not because they are criminal with intent, but because they are unwell. And this article actually points out that like the three largest health care, mental health care providers in the country, Cook County Jail, the jail in Los Angeles, and I think the one in New York, if I'm not mistaken. There's the three largest healthcare providers in the country are fucking jails, man. County jails. Or like local jails for huge parts of the country.

That is unconscionably awful because those systems are set up for punitive and retributive and criminal justice measures. They are not set up to provide healthcare. They're just not set up to provide, imagine if like, imagine if it was something other than mental health. I always think about this.

Imagine if it was something else other, imagine if like the three most prominent places that to give dialysis was a Cook County jail. You'd scratch your head at that, right? You'd be like, that's fucking weird. Why is Cook County jail doing more dialysis treatments than any other place? That doesn't make any sense, right?

You would be like, that's fucking bizarre. We sort of implicitly understand the reasons why this is the case for mental health care, because we treat it differently than other types of health care. And we criminalize the types of behaviors that are concomitant with mental health challenges. So these are people who have like bullshit, like criminal trespass and like, yeah, just fucking nothing.

Someone in this article pulled someone else's hair. So they were in a, they were in a, in a psychiatric facility. They pulled one of the nurse's hair just because they were having a fit. Someone called the police and then put them in a cell. They took them away. And then they took them away from that care that they were getting. And they put them in a cell. And then they died because that's what happened.

Because we are, like, this reminds me of that whole argument about defund the police. I don't know if you remember this whole back and forth where they kept on saying are like, this reminds me of that whole argument about defund the police. I don't know if you remember this like whole back and forth where they kept on saying like, you know, the police aren't, they're not good at this. You call them your house and they routinely shoot people that are going through mental breakdowns, right? They routinely shoot these people and they kill them. They kill these people. And then there's no repercussions. You know, there's nothing, nothing happens afterwards. What happens is, is someone says, well, it's not even oopsie or we're sorry. It's just, yeah, we, we, we thought we were in danger and then that's the end of it. And then people review it and say, yeah, they thought they were in danger.

It's cool. Put that guy back on whatever, put him back on fucking the force or give him a little time off. Right. Take him off his administrative leave or whatever. So we have, you know, we have this idea that the police should walk out and be able to handle all these things

and they're not equipped for it. And we do the same thing with correctional facilities. We say, there's all of these things that you should be able to handle, and one of them is mental illness. And we're like, no, they shouldn't be able to handle that because they're not good at it.

They don't know what they're doing. I want to read a couple pieces of this article. So one of them, one of them starts out, it says when someone in jail stops eating or drinking it's extremely dangerous. A professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz told me it's a crisis that requires moving someone immediately out of solitary confinement or in a traditional jail setting and into a psychiatric facility for close clinical care and observation. And there's no will to do that in our country. There's no will in our country.

Like we are constantly in our government. I mean, we've been talking about it since the beginning of the Trump term. Cutting. What can we cut? What gets cut? How do we save money? in our government, I mean, we've been talking about it since the beginning of the Trump term, cutting. What can we cut? What gets cut? How do we save money? What gets cut here? You know, this is our government,

they don't care enough about people, they're sending them down to El Salvador, but do you think that they're gonna fix this problem in the next four years? Do you think that there's gonna be a wave of, because there's all these protests that happen outside these jails. I mean, this is something that I'm just learning about,

but I'm sure I know a lot of other people know about, this isn't gonna get fixed by our administration. This is gonna get fixed through, like you suggest, this is gonna be grassroots organizations that help stem the bleeding on this. They're gonna be the ones that take in the people who might go to jail instead of, they would have gone to jail instead they'll come to their facility

or be taken care of in these other different types of places. Those are gonna be the people who stop this because the government has no will to do this whatsoever. No will whatsoever. We have a punitive, you mentioned earlier, we have a vengeance-based, punitive-based justice system in this country that doesn't care the moment you,

the moment you're deemed unworthy Yeah, the moment they they they put that orange jumpsuit on you with the big red letter a Then they let you into the general population that we don't give a fuck about you anymore We don't care what happens to you and we we actually I take that back. We care that You go through some really really hard times and that when you leave, you never gets better. It never gets better. We're not going to take that A off. It's an F. It's a felon. It's a felon. We'll never take it off in large parts of this country. That will make you a second class citizen for the rest of your life.

There's a couple of things about this that I was thinking about when I was reading this article. And one of the things is the level of depraved indifference that you have to have as a human being to watch somebody starve to death or watch somebody dehydrate to death or just to have that callousness. And I was thinking about this, I was like, well, how is that possible? Because there's a part of me that's like,

there's no way I would do it, right? Like I'm like, why is there no way I would do what I'm doing? But I think I don't know that I believe that, right? Because we are all susceptible to the psychology of dehumanization. The psychology of dehumanization is inherent in these types of systems and you were just talking about it. When we put people in jail, we create with intentionality,

a us versus them that dehumanizes, literally turns these people into something that is less than human. And as soon as we make somebody less than human, their suffering doesn't feel the same. It's not the same thing. Right? If I saw somebody in my family, in my workplace,

in my social circle, in such a dire situation, it would trigger every emotional and psychological alarm bell in your body. You would be like, this is an emergency. You would pick up the phone, you'd pull out all the stops, you'd spend the money, you'd do whatever you need to do to help that person because you would have recognized that their humanity and your humanity are tied together.

That you cannot wake up in the morning and go to bed at night and be a good person in the middle, being indifferent to that level of suffering. And generally speaking, we're not, because we are connected to the people that we are sort of like in contact with every day. The problem with these facilities where we lock people up and throw away the fucking key is even when these are, again, these are not like hardened criminals who are like,

you know, fucking child rapists or something, right? Like these are people who seriously have like criminal trespass or like the most like minor drug charges. These are nothing things. These are not death sentence. Sleeping on a bench overnight. Right. Nothing. This is nothing. These are the kinds of incidences that occur because somebody's unwell, not again because somebody has an intent to hurt society or hurt other people. But we take these people and we move them through a system that strips them of their humanity. And when that happens, the guards, the medical officers,

the wardens, all of the people in the system now can see them as less than fully human. And that's what allows that difference to take place. That's what allows somebody to die. I think you're right. Because I'm like, I don't want to pretend I'm better than that. What I want to recognize is that I'm probably not.

What I am though is thankfully not embedded in a system where every day I am forced to sort of see people as something other than human. I have the luxury of not having to work in a system designed to fool me and fool my emotional and intellectual self by creating difference. I think I would be, I don't think I'm better. I don't think any of us should assume we're better. I think what we should say is we build systems that create this inevitability

and we have to fix it by creating systems that continue to see everybody as fully human. And I don't know how you do that exactly. I wonder too, but we have to fix it by creating systems that continue to see everybody as fully human. And I don't know how you do that exactly. I wonder too. But we have to. I wonder too if people that are really empathetic, they either leave or get pushed out really early. Yeah, very impossible too.

I think it's that, you know, this sort of self-corrects. It's sort of like self-leveling polymer or whatever it is, where it's like, the people who come in, if I'm wasting resources all the time, I get called into the whatever boss's office and he says, well, I can't have you here because you keep sending people to psychiatric and we can't afford that. So I'm not gonna keep you on here.

Or I might just self-select out. I might just quit, be like, this is fucking emotionally too much for me. Or it never changes and you're coming in every day and you're like, I told you yesterday she wasn't eating. Right. You haven't fixed it yet.

Like, what the fuck? I told you yesterday. And then you do it again. And then finally you're just like, I just can't do this. I'm not going to come in every day and be a wreck because you can't fix this. I told you this problem and you don't fix it. So it might be that it might self-select those people out too. Where, you know, like maybe there are people who come in and they think they can do good by these, you know,

the people that are in these facilities and they can't even do that because they're hamstrung by the regulations and ways in which they have to treat the bridge with prisoners. And like in the article, one of the things that like blew me away is like, it's telling the story of this poor woman who ends up starving to death in jail. And their family is like, holy shit, we figured this out. There's like a line in there which is like, well, we thought we would expose this

and it would change it. And it doesn't. Doesn't. And that's the part of the system that is hard to reconcile and to wrestle with. I'm having a hard time with that after reading this article there's there's a there's a level of injustice where I think as

Decent people we've kind of grown up with the idea of the expose that changes everything and Here's an expose where everybody involved is like yeah that happens and we're like well fuck I mean aren't we gonna fake this ship this is a great This is a tragedy that should be a scandal of our generation and we're like, well, fuck, I mean, aren't we going to fake this ship? This is a great, this is a tragedy that should be a scandal of our generation. And we're just like, yeah, we've decided not to care about these people. It's, it's, it's when it's really about those people, right? Because if this was, um, you got ripped off on the channel seven news, there'd be, there'd be someone hounding this person, running them down with a camera and being like,

Hey, you stole that money from that person. And they'd be running to their car and they try to get in and it'd be a big scandal. But instead it's, this happens in like, yeah, we're going to settle that lawsuit for 7 million. Cause this guy's leg literally rotted off while he was in jail. Like he was, he had an injury and he, he, they put him in a cell and then like over many, many, many days, he finally got such a bad infection they had to give him an amputation. And they're like, they neglected this person so badly,

they have to give him millions of dollars to compensate him from it. And you find out as you read the article that that's a feature, not a bug, right? They do it because they can pocket a ton of money, undertreat these prisoners, right? And that's why I'm calling them prisoners because that's what they are essentially, right?

You know, like you suggest, these aren't like hardened criminals. These are people who do in time. These are people who are like, I had a breakdown and now I'm in jail. But they are still prisoners, right? And so they come in and they get mistreated because it costs too much money to do a good job,

so they don't care. And whoever makes it out alive, great. If they don't, they have insurance and other things and also the company funds that goes towards that thing, but they've already skimmed the VIG off the top. These rich people have already skimmed the VIG off the top, so they already got the money. They're like, who cares what happens?

And then the business just goes bankrupt. They wash away the debt because they've paid out all these bad, and it's worth paying out these wrongful death type suits and settlements for them to just restart under a different acronym and then just have the same exact correctional facility. Skim is much off the top again by maltreating people.

And then at the end, they just make all the money and the people get screwed. And then they just restart again. They just keep hitting restart over and over and over again. Well, and like, you know, think about, think about a couple of things too, in terms of like, who are the victims here? The victims here are almost always people who have very little resources, friends, family.

We also see, and this is super important, I think about this all the time, that my neck injury has made me think about this. You know, we see people with mental illnesses, especially people with psychotic features to their mental illnesses, as again, less than human. We see them, it's frightening to see somebody go through a psychotic break. It is socially inconvenient for those people to be a part of the general population of our society.

They don't fit in, they don't often operate terribly well within the sort of confines and structures of our society. They are always outsiders and they are very easy to dehumanize. Those people are incredibly, incredibly easy to otherize. They are also people who very often don't have networks of well-connected friends and family that they even know how to reach out and touch anymore. So maybe they have friends and family, people that love them, but those people are very

often vulnerable in ways that they don't even have access to the people who might have resources in their own lives. So like when shit happens and it happens to this cohort of people, it's like these systems, these fucking privatized systems are allowed to shrug at it because these people have been so otherized, they've been so cast off, they've been so segregated from society

that there's nobody to advocate for them. And like a couple of these people that were put in these jails, it was terrible. Like there was a story like, I don't remember which one of them, but one of the, the family was trying to put food on their commissary and trying to like pay for their medicine and they just didn't do it.

They just straight up didn't do it. And so like the families of people who are loving and trying to care for, but they're trying to go through this system that is set up to hurt these people because the suffering is the point of correctional facilities. You're absolutely right. One of the things that, you know,

we're talking about how they weren't capable of taking care of these people, right? They weren't capable of taking care of anybody. They right? They weren't capable of taking care of anybody. They're probably not even care of, let's be honest, they're probably not capable of taking care of anyone. Yeah, right, yeah, anyone. Anyone, right? Yeah.

Like anyone. But what they're not capable of doing is taking care of people who are having psychotic breaks, right, very, very clearly. Very clearly, yeah. And I wanna read this part. They told this person, the person who wrote this article that these companies that run these facilities, the psychiatrists meet with ailing inmates virtually from out of state

for only a matter of minutes, leaving entry level nurses to oversee care in jails. You can't have a licensed practical nurse running a jail for 300 people who have more mental health needs than ever before in history. It generates profit for providers, but is designed to fail. So they are, I mean, think about this, like you're in this facility, you're not being taken care of. And the only time you can see somebody who can maybe help you is for three minutes over Zoom. It's fucking wild. That's what you get. If you get that, if you get that, but if you,

even that is, I mean, that's an awful, that's an insult to those, it's an insult to the people that are in those facilities. And you're a person who by definition is not well enough to advocate for yourself. Yes, yeah. You know, like, again, I think of this like, cause I, like I hurt my neck, right?

What did I do to deserve that? Nothing. I woke up, my neck's fucked up. The same is I hurt my neck, right? What did I do to deserve that? Nothing. I woke up, my neck's fucked up. The same is true for mental illness, right? These people are not deserving of an illness. We are all susceptible to it. Tomorrow, tonight, I could go home and have a psychotic break, there is nothing that secures my future

because I didn't have an episode today that means I won't have an episode tomorrow. That's not how that works. Like there's likelihoods, but that's all there is, right? So like we are all susceptible to this. We are all in danger. There's, I think a really, it's the welfare problem, right? There's an idea that like,

because you're not on welfare now and you've never needed it, you'll never need it. Because you're not sick now, you'll never get sick. Because you're not on welfare now and you've never needed it You'll never need it because you're not sick now You'll never get sick because you're not one of these people today You may not be one of these people tomorrow my guys We could all at any time at any time be one of these people at any time There is nothing about you. You're you're not magic. I'm not magic We all could wake up and fucking have a busted neck like it's just how that works

Yeah, and the same is true for like, you know these these folks who have mental illness and I think too of like Haley and the struggles she's gone through over the last few years I go to every doctor's appointment with her as an advocate Because it is hard to show up and be vulnerable and to be sick and to have to advocate for yourself. So it's better and all the best practices say, bring somebody to help advocate for you. These people get three fucking minutes with no advocate

on a fucking Zoom call with a fucking nurse. It's what you get, man. How is that supposed to secure them anything approaching care? Yeah, yeah. Another thing that's a problem too is these companies that run these things and even the jails that run these things that are like county run, right?

So let's say it's your money is paying for it regardless. Whether you're hiring a private contractor or you're hiring people directly through the county, you're paying for it, right? But what's happening is when someone dies in these facilities, they start doing, other people like this reporter start doing investigations. So they've asked for public records.

These are public records that we should be allowed to walk in and ask for. And so they'll ask for things like, how many people have starved to death in here? And they'll say, none. None have done it. And then they'll say, okay, well, just give me a list of all the people who died.

And so they do. And then they find multitude of people who died via starvation that they'd list as natural causes because they died of a natural cause, but they really died because they were starved to death or because they dehydrated to death. And then they, and it's essentially a coverup and they're allowed to obfuscate

and not answer these questions in a way that is that every other person would understand these questions. They're allowed to obfuscate that and to shift things around and to make it so they have a harder time finding out how many people are actually going through these types of problems.

You know, for all the names that are listed in this, all the stories you get to read in this article about all these people's horrible torture before they died, how many are untold? How many don't we know? Because there was, you said earlier, they gotta be their own advocate because they've lost touch with family, friends.

Maybe they're solo. Maybe they don't have anybody. And now what? And now what? And now what? Now who knows, right? Now that's just another person who died in care. That's just another person who died in the government's care. And now that gets swept under the rug

and there's nobody there to be upset about it, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, man. The stories in this article are almost too much to discuss. Like they're upsetting. Like they're upsetting. Like they're upsetting. These are upsetting ways for people to live. These are also people who are being put

into solitary confinement, which we know is a driver of psychosis for people who are not prone to psychosis. So like if you took somebody who is fairly well adjusted and you put them in solitary confinement for any appreciable length of time, their mental health deteriorates very rapidly. It's why many, many countries in the world consider this

a form of torture to be put in solitary confinement. We here in the States use solitary confinement fairly routinely. And for a long time. For extremely long, like unbearably long periods of time. So we're taking unwell people and we're making them worse. And we're doing it over and over again. And they are dying in these terrible ways.

And then like you said, these for-profit organizations that help run the medical pieces are in cahoots with the counties. They are in cahoots with the people who are writing the contracts and they are lying or obfuscating the birth certificates. One of the people, or death certificates rather, one of the people that they were talking to like an advocate or a spokesperson for like one of these horrible fucking terror companies, they murder fucking orgs. They said something like, oh, well, you know We try to you know, it's our policy to try to convince everybody to eat food But you know, we can't be responsible if people just stop eating on their own and it's like yeah, you are responsible

Yeah, you take on that responsibility The one who did it you like and and again we know this in other situations, right? Because like there are time there have been times in the past. You wouldn't do that if you owned a daycare. You wouldn't do that, but like. You know what I mean? There have been times where people have been forcibly fed when they were trying to do a protest, right?

Yeah, yeah, one of those starving protests. Yeah, like a hunger strike. People have done hunger strikes. Neither of us would know what that is. We're both just like, what is that? I wouldn't fucking skip lunch. I don't skip taking a mint when it's offered. So people have been forcibly fed in the middle of a hunger strike, and these are not people going through a psychotic break.

The idea that somebody is making an informed, personal, rational choice in the middle of an irrational space in their life, and that they can be like, oh, well, I mean, they just, they wanted to die horribly. Like, get the fuck out of here. Who's, and again, it calls to mind, Cecil. What ghoul is writing that? Like, what's broken in that person?

Well, I want to read part of this, and this is gonna be graphic. So I want to read part of this and this is going to be graphic. So I'm going to read a little piece that's a little graphic. If you want to just skip forward like 45 seconds or so, if this is a little maybe too much for you. Um, LaSalle Corrections neglected to treat someone because they were seriously ill and they wound up getting sudden blindness. She found that this woman who's in the cell found it difficult to locate the food and water in her cell and began to go without it because she was blind.

In jail, footage, in jail, the footage that I received obtained by this, well, I think it was a legal organization, she realized that this person had knocked over the water that she had. And it says that there was a precious cup of water with her food. She tried to drink from it, but there was nothing in it. And she curled up in a fetal position when she found it empty.

Another day she screamed and waved her arms, seeking help from a nurse. The nurse looked at her and then left, jotting according to records, quote, zero needs voice and quote, zero distress noted. So this person wound up dying and their defendants agreed to a $7 million settlement. Because there's footage of it.

Because they don't even care, they're blatantly filming these people dying. This is like, this is like somebody, this is like somebody, somebody, this is like a governmental snuff film someone watched. And like, and like we're paying, you and I are paying $7 million for it. Yeah.

Well, I mean, tell me how this is appreciably different than a concentration camp. I don't know how it is. Cause I can't figure that out. I can't make, I can't, I can't, I can't square that. You're absolutely right. I hear that and I think, I think, you know, you were talking earlier about like, how does a person like see that? Like, this is a person who they wind up dying from complications of meningitis. Oh, Jesus Christ. So they, and you had meningitis.

Meningitis sucks. He said all you did was want to lay down and close your eyes and like get it to stop, right? It sounds like your neck right now. Yeah. and like get it to stop, right? It sounds like your neck right now. Tom has had a lot of moments in his life when he's wanting to just lay down and not have to deal with consciousness. Meningitis sounds like one of those, neck sounds like one of those, back sounds like one of those. Tom, you've had a lot of moments. I've had a couple.

That whole thing and great. It's not so good, man. It's not great. But in any case, this is something you've had. So you know it's a horrible thing to go through. Very painful. And this is someone who went blind because of other,

this in complications. And they suffered and were tortured. They were tortured to death, man. They're tortured to death. How else do you square that? You don't look at that and be like, oopsie, that was an accident. This is someone maliciously writing down

that they didn't need any help. And that's the thing is like, I think that's an apropos analogy, and I don't like using Nazi style analogies, but it's apropos in this case, because there is a level of cruel indifference that only the types of like guards at fucking Buchenwald could possibly have that like how is that different? Somebody has to square that. I see somebody wailing and in dire need and in desperate pain and like I the only way for me to understand

how you can write down Zero Distress Noted is to not see that person as a human being. To see that person, to have a level of like disconnect from their humanity to yours, which is so complete and so total that it is, it's ovens away. I mean, I really feel that way. And I wanna to recognize, like, I worry that that's in all of us. That's a worry that I have. Is that in me?

I don't know. I don't know that it's not. What I know is that if we build systems that encourage it. Yeah, and that dehumanize these people to the point. And this is also reaching out into the rest of the world. They're using dehumanizing language on all kinds of people right now. And so if this is, if they're using,

we've already dehumanized unhoused people and people who are mentally ill and people who do petty crimes even, not just regular, like bad crimes, right? We're talking about petty crimes even, those people are dehumanized. What's next? I want another sort of disturbing part is the care, right?

So according to an internal report, every single person in the mental health unit, some hundred individuals suffered from lice scabies or both. Greater than 90% of the effective inmates were significantly malnourished with obvious muscle wasting, the report continued. This January, the DOG, this is for Fulton County Jail, issued, sued the Fulton County Jail for abhorrent

and unconstitutional conditions, and the county agreed in a settlement and the jail would come under federal oversight. But this is just a county jail, Fulton County Jail, where people, like 90% of the people there, you know what you're talking about, like are every single one of the people had lice and scabies? Because this, like you're not taking care of these people.

You're not. You're not taking care of, you don't care about them. You don't care what happens to them. No. They can, and this is suffering, right? You have these things, you're, think about this. You're going through a psychotic break and now you itch all the time.

Yeah. How great is that? How great is that? And compounding those problems and think about how, like, this is such a solvable issue, like delousing other, like we know how to delouse people. Yeah. You know, like this is not a problem everywhere. It's a problem here.

It's a problem here because the system has said these people aren't worth the minimum level of hygiene. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tiny, it's, it's an amount of work that they would have to do and nobody's willing to do it. And they're not willing to, I, I guarantee they're not willing to spend the money either. You know what I mean? Like, like this is a County jail. It's not run by a pro for-profit prison or whatever for-profit company that runs these correctional facilities. So this is a, this is a, but this is also another symptom of the problem that we have in this country. The reason why these people go through such hardships in the for-profit stuff is because

we've already deemed that the amount of money we're willing to spend is very little. And so we're willing to pay somebody to skim off the top and give them even less. And then we're able, we're doing the same thing in our regular county jails all across the country. We're paying less and less to house these people to make sure that they're, you know, because we don't care about them. So we're like, well, that, that's easy to cut. Because there's like, there's a really strong sentiment in the public and you see it all the time. They're like, ah, you know, if you don't want to fuck around, if you fuck around, you're going to find out, you know, anyone who goes to jail for any reason is just inherently a bad person

And I don't believe that for a second because I'll tell you what like I'm 47 years old and I've broken the law sure I don't know anybody actually who at some point has not broken the law. Yeah, so like The only reason that I never got in trouble for it is I am a white guy that didn't get caught Yep, yeah, so it's the only reason so I've broken the law now that I never got in trouble for it is I am a white guy that didn't get caught. That's it. So it's the only reason. So I've broken the law. Now I've never done any like big major crimes, but like neither do these people in this article.

I did a bunch of foolish transgressions of youth. I've done, but like I also recognize a lot of us are like one moment of lost temper away. Sure. Sure, one road wager way. Yeah. And you know, there are, and again, to speak to the biology of things,

you know, there are things that can happen in your body. Like you could have like a hormonal imbalance as a result of like a disease process going on that could throw your decision-making out of whack. And you could be in a situation where you would never normally act a certain way and you did. And you're not a bad person,

but the system will prosecute you and treat you like you are bad. And then you'll get thrown into a system where everybody has decided, everyone in jail sucks and we wanna spend as little as possible. We wanna feed them garbage and we don't wanna give them medical care because they're bad. and if you're not

Bad, you wouldn't be in jail and it's like motherfucker. Everyone I know is broken the law Yeah, I should be in jail and you should be everybody. I don't know anybody who hasn't broke I don't know anybody who didn't drink before they were 21 or take drugs recreationally or you know get into a fistfight that's assault, you know, like Everybody has done something, I guarantee it. If you're not in jail, it's because you didn't get caught. These people got unlucky. The idea that we're gonna throw them in jail

and then strip them constantly of every resource so they can't eat anything good or get medicine or be fucking hygienically taken care of, that's you. That's you, you would do that to you, you would Like that's you. That's you. You would do that to you. You would do that to your loved ones. You would do that to your kid. I think about my kids.

Like what if like, what if the kids, like my kids I love so much, like what if one of them lost their temper and did something stupid? You know? And then they went to jail. And then this happened to them. And it's like holy shit,

that fucking wheel just starts spinning on you, and it spins on you and spins on you. And like, these aren't bad people, man. We moralize all wrong, all wrong about these folks. I wanna read another piece here, and this is another person who died. Mother of two was placed in a concrete cell with no toilet, sink, or bed,

where she fell deeper into a psychosis. At one point, no one opened the door for her cell for five straight days. She rarely was given water and discarded much of her food. Finally, the jail staff found her naked and unresponsive on the floor. They watched as the jail and medical staff mocked this person, laughed at her, and dragged her from one place to another, semi-conscious, to determine what to do about her condition. They left her in the medical cell with a cup of Gatorade, which she was unable to drink. She later died.

I mean, they treat you like you're like a baggage. You're like a nothing. Like you're not even human anymore. And it's not even like human because, you know, even if it was an animal, you would feel for it. You know what I mean? Even if it was an animal, you would feel for it. You know what I mean? Like even if it was an animal, you'd be like, that's not something that we should be doing

to animals either, right? You shouldn't be treating animals like this. And they're treating people like this. They're laughing, they're thinking it's funny or whatever. I think it self-selects for cruel people, I really do. I think it self-selects for cruel people. Cause I can't imagine, you know, like you're saying, yeah, I hope I'm not this person.

And you're like, God, Tom, how bad could it be if you're just laughing at people who have done it? Like it's a horror, like it's a genuine horror. And this is someone who, you know, just had a psychotic break and then they, and like you suggest earlier, we're not going to make this person eat. And we're not going to pay attention to this person.

And we're not going to open the door, I'll just slide shit in there and whatever. And then she's not even like in a real cell. we're not gonna make this person eat, and we're not gonna pay attention to this person, and we're not gonna open the door, I'll just slide shit in there and whatever, and then she's not even like in a real cell, she's just in like a weird little holding area. With no like toilet, sink. Nothing. Nothing, like that is an inhuman way to treat,

and the thing is like, that's supposed to be illegal, all this stuff is supposed to be illegal, and like when it happens, I think the reason it's not a great big scandal is because we've already decided that because you walk through those doors, you don't matter. Well, and one good thing about the article is later in the article, they talk about how some people who have done this horrible shit have been criminally prosecuted for their stuff. They've gotten the book thrown at them because of the shit that they did.

They were, not only were they prosecuted, but they wound up, it says that the entire services division of this thing was criminally prosecuted, specifically for allowing these things to happen. So that's an important thing, and it needs to happen way more often. I think you need to be, you know, you take these people under, you know, into your care, you're responsible for them.

It's like a daycare. If you, if you wound up, if a kid died while you were taking care of them under daycare, there would be a heavy investigation. And once that was done, they would either find you wrong. You did something wrong and or you did something negligent or you did something that was done, they would either find you wrong, you did something wrong, or you did something negligent, or you did something that was out of your control. They would find something, right? They would look through it.

Our criminal justice system should go after them whenever they get an opportunity. And hey, maybe if they're afraid of going to their own jails, they'll spruce up their jails a little. Tell you what, right? You're terrified to go, I don't wanna live in here. You know? Yeah. Yeah, and here's the part of the, I don't want to live in here. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And here's the part of the article that talks about how the settlements are paid. Working with researchers at the investigative reporting lab, I studied more than 40 lawsuits involving claims of starvation, dehydration, and severe neglect filed against more than a dozen correctional entities and county governments.

We found that again and again, taxpayers ended up paying multimillion dollar settlement bills for actions that killed off members of their own communities, but most major correctional care providers too, were saddled with millions of dollars in liability, raising the question, would it be so expensive after all to provide adequate

psychiatric care for these people? Three of the largest correctional care corporations have filed for bankruptcy in recent years. They've been also hit with 1,500 lawsuits claiming inadequate medical care of incarcerated people. And then this person who's an executive director of a nonprofit that fights commercialization of corrections says, a big part of the industry's business model is filing for bankruptcy, cleansing their balance sheet for responsibility for their misconduct and then starting all over again so they just they just reset they just hit the reset and they started all over but this is millions of dollars and it's your

money it's just like what the police union or whatever right it's all our money it's all our money that we all have to pay these cities have to pay when the police do something bad, there's never any repercussions and they wind up having to pay, but they never like personally have to pay. And like these corporations that are owned by these people who are making money off this hand over fist,

they don't ever feel the bite from this. It's not like you can go after these millionaires who own these companies and take everything they own. No, right. You're separated from it. Yeah, we've created this legal fiction that distinguishes between people and what they do when they go to work.

Yeah. And to some degree, I think that's wise. There's a lot of wisdom in doing that. But there needs to be a level of depravity that's just like, hey man, you had a fucking responsibility. Not just you had a responsibility, but you had a responsibility to build a machine that does a better job. Speaking of building a machine that does a better job, here's a quote, quote, we're looking

at develop a chat bot for jails and prisons that would interact with our patients in terms of helping them with their mental health needs. Cool, that'll fix it. Hey, that's neat. Neat, awesome. Every single time I talk to a chat bot for anything, I'm like, yeah, man, you literally didn't fix anything. And then I'll say, the other day I was on, where was I? I was, oh yeah, I bought a device,

it's like a little device that's like a macro thing for your computer that does like little macros for it. And it wasn't working. So I went onto the website for this thing and I, and I, and I was like, I need to fill out a ticket, but the only thing I saw was a chat. So I had to chat and like, Hey, I'm an automated service. What can I help you with? And I'm like, yeah, every time I try to download icons for this thing, it just says that it

doesn't work. And it's like, well, here's how you do it. And it showed me thinking like, did that help? And I'm like, no, it didn't help. And it literally pasted the exact same thing. And then I said, did that help? And I was like, no. And then they pasted it again.

And I'm like, could you imagine what's going to happen with these poor people in jail? They're going to say, hey, I need medical assistance. But like, if you need medical assistance, that seems like a big, big, big deal. But I can't really help you. Anyway. Let me paste this again for you. Hey, I'm having a, a psychotic break and I'm feeling a little paranoid. I'd like to speak to a dystopian robot about that. I know, could you imagine? So this is a, this is one of those things that, you know, there's sometimes we'll sit down and we'll start to read a story. And this is one of those things that, you know, there's sometimes we'll sit down

and we'll start to read a story. And this is sometimes much, you know, much of the time when we read, it's a lot of times about stories of abuse. They're hard to get through for us. Like, you know, I'll go read them and like, you're just like, ah, it's a hard story to get to. But this is like a 25 page story.

It's a long story. And there's not just one instance of this stuff. But you owe it to yourself. This is a New Yorker thing, but we have the web archive link so you can read it if you want. And patrons will hear Tom read it. But it's, it's, it's, if you got it, if you get a chance and you think you should, it's something that I think you should read.

If you listen to this podcast and you made it all the way through and you're here at the end and you didn't read this article yet, take the time to read it. Listen, read the people's names, Yeah. Those people's names who died because you know, they died and at least that's one thing that we can say that something happened for their memory for the, for the, for them dying. At least we should know that it happened. Yeah. I think that's really important, man. I, if you can stomach this, um, listen to it or read it. Yeah. It's, it it. It is important to know. Some shit you should just know.

We should just have a responsibility to know. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to be back next time, but we're going to leave you like always too, with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit.

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