CARSON CITY - Inmates at the state maximum security prison in Ely are receiving poor medical care, including diabetics who do not receive insulin and prisoners being unable to see doctors for extended periods, a federal official said.
"Medical care at Ely appears to be cost-driven," Gary Taylor, an assistant federal public defender, told a legislative committee last week.
An investigation by Taylor's office, which handles the appeals of death row inmates in Ely, found numerous examples of inadequate medical care, including the fact that there was no doctor at the prison for two months, Taylor said.
He said the previous physician was an obstetrician-gynecologist with no experience in treating men or working in a prison.
Taylor added that the prison's X-ray machine has been broken for six months, inmates wait weeks to see a doctor and prisoners' medical treatment sometimes is stopped without reason.
Taylor and Assistant Federal Public Defender Michael Pescetta called for an independent audit of inmates' medical care.
A public advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada said the same stark conditions exist at the women's prison in North Las Vegas, where inmates are charged to see doctors and to get medical test results.
While prison officials have acknowledged that there were problems when a new prison pharmacy opened earlier this year, they insist that those difficulties posed no life-threatening issues.
"What do you expect from the federal public defender's office? He's an advocate" for the inmates, said Fritz Schlottman, a spokesman for the Corrections Department.
Noting that the prisons have to operate within their budgets, Schlottman added: "You get what you pay for ... How many people on the outside get free medical care? They've got a pretty good deal when you look at it."
Under that "pretty good deal," inmates at the women's prison are charged $8 to see a nurse or doctor and $16 to get results of any tests, said Lee Rowland, a public advocate for the ACLU.
Because many inmates do not have money, an inmate who has a Pap smear may not be told - for the lack of $16 - that the test has detected cancer, Rowland said.
Dr. Bruce Bannister, who recently took over as head of the prison's medical division, conceded that "there has been some dysfunction among the medical staff" at Ely.
But he insisted that inmates' medical treatment "is not as bad as it looks on paper." Medical emergencies at the prisons are always answered, Bannister said, adding that inmates with diabetes and blood pressure problems "do better in prison" than they usually would on the outside.
Pescetta, though, told the panel that serious problems exist at Ely. An inmate who has a heart attack might not be informed of it for months, and inmates' ability to see doctors is affected, not only by medical needs, but by staffing issues such as whether correctional officers are available to escort physicians.
One prisoner who had lived in Ely's infirmary for four months died because no one discovered the depth of his medical problems until he "was too far gone," Taylor said. Although Rowland said conditions at the women's prison in North Las Vegas mirror those at Ely, prison officials have denied allegations of poor medical care at the women's facility.
Rowland, whose group interviewed 100 female inmates over the past week, said there are serious problems of high blood pressure and diabetes at the prison.
She said there a "complete lack of preventive care" and women often go as long as six years without a dental examination, causing many to lose their teeth.
"It's heartbreaking to see a women with no teeth being given an apple," Rowland said.
Rowland and ACLU Director Gary Peck joined the call for an independent audit of prison medical care.
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