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| Report: Corrections failures contributed to inmates' deaths |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 06/14/2004 |
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Failure to provide adequate medical care and "continued psychological abuse" by Corrections Department staff contributed to the deaths of two inmates, an advocacy group said last Friday. The report by Vermont Protection & Advocacy comes more than three months after an independent investigation said state policies and actions were partly to blame for the deaths of some of the seven people held in state custody in the past two years, including the two inmates, James Quigley and Neil Prentiss. Corrections officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Quigley, 52, was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. In February 2001 he was transferred to Vermont from Florida to be housed at the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. The report called Quigley "an outspoken critic" of the prison system who routinely filed grievances. Quigley was later transferred to the St. Albans jail and kept in solitary confinement because corrections officials believed he was trying to escape, the report said. Quigley hanged himself in his cell last October. The report said corrections staff violated many of the department's rules by not properly evaluating Quigley's mental health and checking on him in the hours before he committed suicide. Corrections procedure requires prison officers to see physical evidence of an inmate in his cell - called "seeing skin" - during their regular rounds. The report cites a Vermont State Police interview with one of the officers assigned to Quigley unit who "did not remember at what point he stopped seeing skin" inside Quigley's cell before the inmate hanged himself. Prentiss, an inmate in Vermont and Virginia for several years, had a history of serious illness and complained while at the South Burlington prison of severe pain and other problems. Shortly before his death in November 2002, he was transferred from the prison to Fletcher Allen Health Care, and from there to the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., where he died. |
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