This Makes Me Sick!!

http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/767924.html

Woman details stay in Holding Center

Linda Arthur moves slowly on arthritic knees. She’s 60 years old, 5 feet 5 inches tall, and a breast-cancer survivor who reaches for her medicine at noon each day.

And she’s dangerous.

Or at least she was treated as a danger to society for a weekend in December when jailed in the Erie County Holding Center. She was denied her medicine and other basics of civilized life: toilet paper, a toothbrush, soap, water, a blanket, a bed.

It all stemmed from a neglected parking ticket.

Arthur recently read that the U.S. Justice Department accused Erie County’s Holding Center and Correctional Facility of trampling on inmates’ civil rights. So she wants to tell her story.

She is an ordinary Erie County resident. She carries a Bible, not a gun. She describes herself as a divorcee with credit issues who owns horses in Evans and wants to reopen her flower shop that failed.

Arthur probably wouldn’t admit it, but she seems easily flummoxed by bureaucracies. Still, she figures that if she can end up in the Holding Center, anyone can. And to her, no one deserves the treatment she got the weekend after Christmas.

Holding Center personnel, she said, seem to dismiss everyone as a criminal even when they’ve been convicted of nothing.

“They are passing judgment on people,” she said. “And that’s not their jobs.”

Sheriff Timothy B. Howard said Arthur had sent his office an e-mail on March 22 complaining of her treatment, but a jail manager who contacted her reported that Arthur was not interested in filing a formal personnel complaint with the professional standards unit.

“We would have to assume that since she never followed up with the complaint, that she was satisfied,” Howard said.

Arthur, however, said she thought she was filing a complaint when she described her treatment to Howard’s staff member. She said she was not, as Howard related, more angry about the Evans police who arrested her and her pending divorce.

“That’s what they are focusing on, to take the focus off of them,” she said.

Arthur’s ordeal began Dec. 27, when she entered the Evans police station to see if officers could help her collect support from her estranged husband. The officers ran her name and saw that Buffalo’s City Court had issued an arrest warrant for her.

Within minutes, she was under arrest and later shuttled by Buffalo police to the Holding Center over her protests. She said she was never told about the allegations in the warrant but suspected they stemmed from some city parking tickets she had paid months earlier.

While Arthur had paid the tickets to free her 8-year-old van from an impound lot — and can present the receipt to prove it — she and a court clerk had overlooked a lingering ticket, and that led to the suspension of her auto registration. Arthur insists she was never notified.

Evans police Capt. Charles Danzi said this week that his officers probably checked with Buffalo police to confirm that Arthur should be arrested. Aside from that, Danzi said, police have no authority to ignore a warrant.

Arthur said that, when booked into the Holding Center, she told one deputy and then another that she would need her medicine — Arimidex, which helps shrink tumors. Arthur had a mass removed from her breast in 2007 and had finished chemotherapy treatments in August 2008, she said.

“They don’t respond,” she said of the deputies. “They just ignore you.”

Several former Holding Center inmates have contacted The Buffalo News with the same complaint: Holding Center personnel appear indifferent to their medical issues, even though the State Commission of Correction, the agency that polices local jails, requires that prescription medicines begin without delay.

The commission is investigating the death of Marguerite Arrindell of Buffalo, who asked deputies for her blood-pressure medicine over several days before she suffered a stroke and died in 2008 at age 54, according to the lawsuit that blames Erie County for her death.

In a similar example, Craig S. Beatty went into a diabetic coma in 2005 after Holding Center personnel denied him regular doses of insulin. His lawsuit also is pending.

Arthur said another woman in her Holding Center room — the “bullpen” — had been bitten on her upper back in a fight before her arrest, and the wound was oozing blood. Her requests for medical attention were ignored, Arthur said.

Lack of drinking water

Arthur was never beaten or roughed up. But she described these conditions:

• While she and the other women were given meals — low-cost jail fare with milk or juice — hours passed with no water. On Sunday, Dec. 28, she watched a female deputy return with bottles of water. Then Arthur’s hopes sank as the woman gave the bottles to other deputies.

“All in a row, they opened their bottles, looked at us, and then drank their water all down,” she said.

Howard said jail deputies are not obligated to provide inmates bottled water. But he doubts Arthur’s claim that no water was available because the bullpen’s rooms have sinks.

“I don’t believe that we didn’t have water,” Howard said. “There are times when there could have been a water problem, but such a problem would not span two days.”

To that, Arthur said neither she nor any of the women held with her could get the sink to work. And when they asked for water between meals, she said, deputies responded that they had provided the women with milk.

• ‚Arthur said she remained in the clothes she wore when arrested, and they were too thin for a detention room with cold air from a ceiling vent.

“It was so cold I was violently shaking all over,” she said. At one point, a deputy threw in a sweat shirt and sweat pants for her but they were of little help, she said.

With no clocks, no windows and the lights always on, she lost track of time. At one point late Sunday, she was given a mat and allowed to sprawl out in a darkened room.

• ‚She was told she might go before a judge on Sunday morning but her paperwork was not ready or had been misplaced, which apparently is not uncommon, according to other inmates. A 2007 federal lawsuit implies that paperwork can go missing on purpose.

Louise K. Nolley of Buffalo described the instructions a female deputy shouted to a group of inmates.

“There are no sheets, blankets or supplies, so don’t ask,” the deputy said, according to Nolley’s court papers. And if there is toilet paper, the deputy continued, anyone using it for reasons other than than to wipe noses or bottoms would face this fate: “Your papers will be lost and you will not be taken over for arraignment in the morning.”

Nolley, who has been arrested several times, won a $150,000 verdict in 1992 in an AIDS-discrimination lawsuit against the Holding Center.

• Arthur said she asked to make a telephone call, to tell family members of her whereabouts. She got the chance around 2 a.m. Sunday — about 10 hours after her arrival — but got no answer. She didn’t see her family until Monday morning, when released. They had pieced together where she might be.

Guilty plea, $15 fine

A month after her release, Arthur pleaded guilty to violating Section 1201(a) of the Vehicle and Traffic Law — parking illegally.

It costs more than $100 a day to house an average county prisoner. The fine for her violation was $15.

If Arthur’s description of the conditions sounds familiar, it’s because state regulators, not just other inmates, have complained about them for years. The Commission of Correction has repeatedly faulted the Holding Center for failing to provide bedding and hygiene items to people awaiting arraignment in the bullpen.

Issues with the bullpen go back more than a decade. After a class-action lawsuit in 1995, a federal court judge found that Holding Center conditions constitute a wanton infliction of pain and unjust punishment, violating the U.S. Constitution.

Erie County added capacity to the Holding Center, but then in 2003 signed what has become a disastrous contract with Buffalo in the name of government consolidation.

Buffalo’s pretrial cellblock at Buffalo Police Headquarters was absorbed into the Holding Center, opening the door to a crush of new inmates and pinching county government because the service costs more than the city pays, according to an audit by Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz.

While the state sets lower standards for prearraignment cells in police stations, the Holding Center is classified as a New York jail and must provide items of personal hygiene, an inmate handbook and showers, among other things.

Those higher standards would be less of a chore for jailers if inmates were promptly arraigned and either sent on their way or assigned a cell. But the Holding Center is the state’s second- largest pretrial detention facility. An inmate can linger in a bullpen with others for hours or days.

The holding rooms contain a bench but no beds, so people sprawl out on the floor. They share a toilet. They go without their medicines.

Under pressure from state and federal regulators, Erie County officials say they are making progress to improve the Holding Center. In February, the Commission of Correction told Howard that, if bullpen conditions did not improve, a lawsuit was likely. He made several improvements this year, and he often moves inmates before arraignment into cells where they get bedding and access to showers.

Howard, interviewed Tuesday, had two requests: That inmates complaining about conditions do so soon after they experience them, not months later when they are difficult to investigate. And that the Holding Center be judged based on this year’s state-sparked improvements, not on the past.

After a series of additional inspections this year, the commission’s staff reported that they had found sporadic upgrades but did not believe personnel could sustain them during the busy summer months. However, the commission has not filed suit.

The sheriff also has transferred his medical staff to the control of county Health Commissioner Anthony Billittier IV, on the theory that, as a medical professional, Billittier can better supervise inmate care.

Arthur is not suing Erie County over her treatment. And she says she’s not trying to harm the sheriff as Howard faces re-election this year.