The Revolting Accolades for Delaware Corrections Commissioner Stan Taylor

There is something seriously wrong with many of the powerbrokers in the state of Delaware. They have become so incestuous and clubby that they have lost nearly all sense of moral proportionality, and the capacity to feel indignation at the actions and neglect of one of their own is virtually absent. Nothing his has brought this point home more than today’s revolting accolades for Correction Commissioner Stan Taylor.

Revolting Accolade #1

Listen to this pathetic special pleading from the News Journal’s editorial page:

Delaware will lose a loyal public servant when Stan Taylor retires early next year. (link)

If you don’t know about Delaware’s prison healthcare scandal, by the time you finish reading this post, you’ll find Mr. Taylor’s so-called “loyalty” a poisonous virtue.

Mr. Taylor has been chief of the state's prison system since 1995. Most of his tenure was marked by devoted service to the state and high quality professionalism.

However, the last few years of his service were marred by problems not completely of his making.

Tight budgets forced overtime on prison guards and strained relations between employees and employers. (link)

Oddly in this litany of the events that were not Mr. Taylor’s fault, the editorial omits one that appeared in their newspaper today in the story about his retirement:

An inmate took a prison counselor hostage and sexually assaulted her before he was shot and killed by a department SWAT team. The woman counselor filed a federal civil rights suit and settled out of court last year for $1.65 million.

Most recently, revelations that the prison's health-care system is plagued with problems ultimately led to a federal investigation that is still under way. (link)

But what’s a mere 1.65 million of taxpayer dollars among friends? But if you are tempted to think that this display of neglect was an isolated incident, then wait till you dig into what is glossed over in the editorial’s ending:

But a News Journal investigation into claims of inadequate health care in the prisons shocked most of the state. Instead of acknowledging the problem, the Minner administration, with Mr. Taylor as its point man, counterattacked its critics. That response led to the federal investigation, which, no matter how it turns out, will end up costing the state a bundle of money.

It is a shame that Mr. Taylor's 30-year career with the Delaware prison system must end under this cloud. He deserved better. (link)

Once you dig into the swamp of the prison health care scandal, you’ll find the editorial’s “Except for the inadequate health care in the prisons business, Stan Taylor deserved better” argument decisively reminiscent of the expression “Except for that Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.”

Revolting Accolade #2

This revolting accolade comes from state Rep. Wayne Smith, the Majority Leader in Delaware’s state House of Representative’s. The audio comes from a WDEL interview:

Notice some of the language Rep. Smith uses. Taylor is an “excellent public servant,” a “gentleman,” a “good public manager,” and Smith is “proud to be associated with him.” Remember that when you hear about how human beings were treated in Delaware’s prison health care system.

Smith acknowledges that there were “issues” on Taylor’s watch. Not outrages mind you; merely “issues.” A female counselor held hostage by a prisoner and raped by him, the necessity of a SWAT team killing him in order to save her is in Smith’s parlance a “situation.”

There are the “alleged problems with prison health side of the department.” The “health side of the department” of the department is a Wayne Smith euphemism for prisoners dying from medical neglect. Many prisoners have died. That some of these “problems” have ended with lawsuits settled in favor of the inmates’ families doesn’t make the “problems” evidence of neglect for Rep. Smith. The cases remain mere allegations in Smith’s mind.

Then there was the “terrible problem of relative underpayment of correction officers” that occurred on Taylor’s watch. Notice that the only adjective Smith uses indicating any sense of outrage regarding one of the “issues” that have occurred during Taylor’s tenure relates solely to money. The problem of underpaying correctional officers alone is “terrible.”

But Rep. Smith cavalierly dismisses all the “issues” by saying, “These are challenges you are going to get in a prison system.”

Really? Do all prison systems have a “brother with two heads?”

The Brother with Two Heads

That is an x-ray of Anthony Pierce’s skull. He was the “brother with two heads”:

Anthony Pierce was known to cellmates as "the brother with two heads."

Pierce was serving 14 months for a parole violation stemming from a burglary charge at the Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown when a small lump appeared on the back of his head. It was January 2001 and a prison doctor employed by a private medical contractor said the marble-size lump was most likely a cyst or an ingrown hair. (link)

If you think the growth on the x-ray hardly qualifies as a “marble-size lump” or an “ingrown hair,” then you haven’t factored in time and the persistent medical neglect of Delaware’s prison health care system:

Seven months later, when the growth had become like a second head, Delaware's contract prison medical director, Dr. Keith Ivens of Correctional Medical Services, stabbed the bulging tumor five times with an 18-gauge needle, withdrawing a bloody fluid.

Rather than keeping the sample for analysis, Ivens emptied the syringe into a trash can.... (link)

After Anthony Pierce transmuted into the brother with two heads under Stan Taylor’s watch, he finally was allowed to see a specialist. The following is an excerpt from the specialist’s report. Although the report is technical the macabre and gruesome physical condition of Anthony Pierce is glaringly evident:

A 21-year-old male was initially evaluated because of a large mass on his head and a headache. The patient stated the mass had been growing for 7 months. He had seen a primary care physician who believed the lump was an abscess. The physician performed cystic aspiration, which revealed a negative result. For the past month, the patient had been experiencing frequent headaches and tenderness at the site of the lump....

A computed tomography (CT) scan, with and without contrast, was obtained of the brain, which revealed a large mass involving the scalp extending from the right temporal region to the vertex. Its maximum anteroposterior dimension was 12 cm and in the transverse dimension, the mass was 7 cm. Without contrast, the CT showed irregular calcification and low attenuation areas, which represented necrosis. With contrast administration, the mass was found to be eroding the right parietal bone, and there was extension through the bone to the right parietal dural surface. There was some compression of the adjacent brain parenchyma (Figure 1B). A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan was performed, and it showed a large mass arising from the posterolateral aspect of the skull on the right side. The mass was 90% extracranial and 10% intracranial . (emphasis mine) (link)

While in Delaware’s prison, Anthony Pierce’s tumor grew for 7 months before he received the medical evaluation by a specialist that he obviously needed. The tumor had burst through his skull during this period. 90% of the tumor’s mass was on the outside of his head. It was impossible for anyone working in the prison to miss. After all that time without proper care, some of the tumor had actually become necrotic (i.e., dead flesh). The examination also revealed tumor was cancerous.

Here’s how 21-year old husband and father Anthony Pierce spent the last days of his life:

Near the end of Pierce's life, the tumor stretched the skin around his face, pulling his right eye closed, causing muscle spasms and crippling pain. (link)

He died on March 22, 2002.

In one important sense, Anthony Pierce’s case wasn’t unusual for Delaware.

How Stan Taylor Set a National Record

Commissioner Stan Taylor, Governor Ruth Ann Minner and the Delaware Legislature put Delaware on the map:

A six-month investigation by The News Journal shows that the lack of care suffered by Pierce is all too common inside Delaware prisons.

AIDS, hepatitis, flesh-eating bacteria and other communicable diseases percolate behind the wire. Inmates in their 20s and 30s die from diseases that people outside prison routinely survive. (link)

Do they ever die! They die in record numbers!

Delaware in 2003 had the nation's highest rate of AIDS-related prison deaths, 87 per 100,000 inmates, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report on HIV in state facilities.

Maryland's rate of 54 per 100,000 inmates was the nation's second highest. The 2003 score marks the second time in four years that Delaware's rate for AIDS-related deaths in prison was the nation's highest...

With a population of 6,600 inmates in Delaware, three to four inmates should be expected to die in a year, said Kramer. But since January 2000, 90 inmates have died. Given that 2005 is 75 percent complete, that works out to about 18 deaths per year. (link)

That’s really a remarkable achievement for the first state. And until the News Journal told him, Stan Taylor didn’t know about his record of accomplishment:

State Correction Commissioner Stan Taylor said he had no idea Delaware's prison death rates were so high. But when pressed to offer some explanation, Taylor added:

"The inmate population tends to be a population that comes to us with a difficult medical history: substance abuse, tattoos, risky sex, a lot of drug behavior. They don't take care of themselves." (link)

Ah, so they don’t care take of themselves. Evidently, Stan Taylor didn’t take care of them either when they were in his care.

Given the deaths by medical neglect in Delaware’s prison system, the suicides, the children born in toilet bowls in prison, the newborns delivered in prison and allowed to die in their mother’s arms, the shackled and chained inmates alone and falling down stairs, the mentally disabled prisoners that die for want of surgery, the falsification of inmates’ medical documents, and much, much more—I find the accolades for Mr. Taylor incomprehensible and disturbing.

I’m left wondering what degree of monstrosities would need to occur to people in the care of Delaware’s government for the powerbrokers in our state to abandon their own and feel outrage.