Medical Healthcare of Prisoners
The Eighth Amendment of the American Constitution prohibits any cruel and unusual punishment of the prisoners. In the case of Estelle v. Gamble (Estelle v. Gamble, 1976), the United States Supreme Court held that any prison personnel who deliberately remains indifferent to the serious medical needs of any prisoner will be held for violating the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (INCIARDI, 1993).
The definition of ‘serious medical needs’ is not clearly given. The kind of situation that constitutes a serious medical need depends on the illness and the circumstances of the case. Courts have held that conditions can be diagnosed by physicians and considered to require treatment.
Further, courts have also held that prisoners may not be given the care of their choice, and the prison officials have the authority to choose among the different treatments available (Teeters, N. 1939).
Depending on the circumstances of the case, medical authorities state that even sex reassignment can be considered a severe medical need. Even emotional distress will be considered a severe medical need (Blumstein, A., 2011).
In short, a serious medical need would be one in which if the prisoner is left untreated, then it may lead to serious health repercussions which may or may not lead to death (Wexler, 1978).
Hence the factors that needs to be determined by the prison personals while evaluating whether the prisoners need serious medical care or not should be determined according to each individual case.
Some essential factors that the prison officials should take into consideration are the developing or detoriating health of the prisoners, the requests of the prisoners for medical attention, the advice of the medical officers of the prison and the previous medical reports of the inmates.
To determine the factors that need to be considered when treating inmates for medical conditions, two instances can be referred for convenience. One unsuccessful treatment occurred when the prison guards in the Idaho prison refused to recognize the non-traditional gender identity of a trans-gender woman (The Bilerico Project, 2014).
The lady had made almost seventy five requests to the prison officials to give her appropriate treatment but the officials had refused to render any sort of treatment to the woman.
Additionally she had some mental illnesses relating to gender identity disorders which later became so severe that she attempted suicide.
Later, she operated on herself and removed her hormone-producing organs. This is a case of serious negligence on the part of the prison officials, and it was a ‘serious medical need’ since the woman was in need of proper physicians.
In this regard, one successful treatment resulting from prison officials’ proper attention to a prisoner’s ‘serious medical need’ needs to be mentioned.
The primary importance of successful medical treatment in prison is the determination of the inmate’s medical condition by the prison officials.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had one of the most successful health care technologies. The state has an IT prison program on health care, which improved the quality of the health of the prisoners dramatically. In fact, this model has been considered as a national model in this particular sphere.
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