Zach has previously written about America’s epidemic of loneliness. Well, consider how lonely it must be to be in jail.
Last week, I went to Arkansas to report a story about the atrocious death of Larry Eugene Price Jr. at the Sebastion County Detention Center in Fort Smith. Price was a paranoid schizophrenic. So guards put him in solitary for a year, where he starved to death, whittling down to 90 pounds on a 6.2 frame.
Here’s an excerpt of the story, published on Truthdig with funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Why Did a Man Starve to Death in an Arkansas Jail?
It was a failure of the system because he shouldn't have even been there.
Larry Eugene Price told social workers that he’d seen a snake crawling on the ground. Price, 51, then said a man had stabbed lit cigarettes in his eyes. It was February 2020, and the staff at the Crisis Stabilization Unit in Fort Smith, Arkansas made a note in his case file that he’d suffered from hallucinations and paranoia after being diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 22.
The unit is designed to work with police to place mentally ill people in treatment instead of jail. But six months later, on Aug. 19, when Price shouted at police officers and flipped them off, he was arrested and charged with “terrorist threatening in the first degree.” Instead of being placed in treatment, he would spend more than a year in the Sebastian County Detention Center pre-trial.
On Aug. 29, 2021, guards found Price unresponsive in his solitary confinement cell. His eyes were wide open. In the previous two months, he hadn’t eaten his meals, but had rather chewed on the styrofoam trays. It was not uncommon for Price to scream and throw his feces at the walls of his segregated cell. His bed was soaked in urine when guards found him. The cell had flooded.
The United Nations secretary general classifies more than 15 days in solitary confinement as torture. Even mentally stable people who get put in solitary experience paranoia, panic attacks and hallucinations. In the 19th century, on a tour of America, Charles Dickens — not known for an overly rosy view of humanity — was shocked when he witnessed prisoners in solitary. “He is a man buried alive,” Dickens wrote.
Emergency Medical Services clocked Price’s weight at 90 pounds on a 6 foot 2 inch frame at the time of his death. In autopsy photos, he looks like the victim of a famine. His feet are bloated and wrinkled from the time he’d spent immersed in rank water. There is a bed sore on his bone-thin thigh.
“My brother did not have to suffer and die,” Rodney Price, Price’s younger brother tells Truthdig.
Price’s death encapsulates nearly everything wrong with the U.S. criminal justice system, and the conditions that make it one of the deadliest in the world.
Price was arrested, instead of treated, during a mental health crisis. He remained in jail because he didn’t have $1,000 for bail money or $100 bond. In solitary, he was neglected by guards. Between Aug. 1 and Aug. 29, they made up to 4,000 wellness checks on him, each time, writing “Inmate and Cell OK.”
Read the rest here:
Before I even got there I already had a ton of inside info about conditions in the jail because I’d gotten in touch with a bunch of the men inside. It’s a double-edged sword. The messaging company, JailATM, is exactly that; it costs 50 cents to send a message and 50 cents to read a message. It sucks to participate in something so exploitative. But, also, it’s a lifeline for people behind bars.
Do you want to do something right now to slightly improve our atrocious criminal justice system? Get a pen-pal.
Here’s how to get in touch with some of the inmates in the jail where Larry Eugene Price died.
1. Sign up for an account with JailATM.
2. Look up the name of a man or woman at the Sebastion County inmate look-up site.
3. JailATM will ask for the state, the facility, and last name of the inmate.
Just shoot them a message saying you’d like to chat.
If you want to help or communicate with a federal inmate, sign up for Corrlinks.com (tip: you have to manually type in the inmate’s prison number—for some reason copying and pasting doesn't work).
And most state facilities use JPay.
I cannot emphasize enough what a huge difference this makes.