Man eaten alive by bed bugs in jail. WTF is wrong with America?

I am sorry for the double tap. Zach has politely tried to dissuade me from spamming subscribers with a thousand posts, but omfhgh what is going with US jails?

ATLANTA, Georgia -- A man died at the Fulton County Jail from being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs says the family attorney.

According to police LaShawn Thompson was arrested for misdemeanor simple battery in Atlanta on June 12.

He was taken to the Fulton County Jail and placed in the psychiatric wing after officials determined he had mental issues.

Family attorney Michael D. Harper released a statement saying Thompson was in jail for three months when he was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by bed bugs and insects. The family also obtained open records which stated that the detention officers and medical staff at the jail noticed that Mr. Thompson was deteriorating, but did nothing to administer aid to him or to help him.

"They literally watched his health decline until he died", says the family in a statement.

The report also states that when his body was found one of the detention officers refused to administer CPR because in her words she "freaked out."

I literally just published a story about a schizophrenic man starving to death in solitary confinement. This was the second story I’ve written this year about a schizophrenic man starving to death in solitary confinement. They both ate nothing but their styrofoam trays. There was another recent story, which I didn’t cover, about a man freezing to death in jail, after guards strapped him to a chair and put him in the freezer. This tho… this might be the worst one.

What is the answer for All the Adults in the Room who scoff at abolish? Yes, something like 3% of the population probably needs to be detained somewhere. But “reform” doesn't fix this. Pretty much the only crime that has a tendency to escalate from misdemeanor into a homicide is domestic violence. There is literally no legal or moral justification for locking up people pre-trial because they are mentally ill and for misdemeanors like shoplifting, or delightfully, in New York, jumping a turnstile.

Somebody give me a book deal to write about US jails. So much focus is on prisons, because of our insane long sentences. And there are absolutely excellent books, like Shane Bauer’s “American Prison,” in which he goes undercover as a prison guard in a private prison in Georgia. But prisons, at least, were designed to contain people longterm. Jails are not. But they still do, because overcrowded prisons send excess populations to tiny county jails staffed by underpaid idiots. And because the worse the jail is, the more likely a prosecutor is to extract a guilty plea with minimal effort. Add to that, incompetent, negligent private for profit health care companies. I mean it’s just insane.

This perverse set of circumstances converge to make jails into torture factories from New York City to the smallest rural county in the South. It’s as American as mass shootings!