Inhumanity Has a Price

Requests to interview county hospital emergency room physician Dr. Frank LoVecchio went unanswered. But there's good reason to believe LoVecchio sees MRSA cases, as well. He just received an $8.9 million federal grant to study MRSA infections.

O'Neil says patients who don't die from organ failure or other MRSA-related causes require amputation or skin excising. "I only typically see patients who are sick enough to require the inpatient hospitalization and treatment. So there are a whole lot more who have the less-complicated skin and skin-structure infections," O'Neil says.

O'Neil wouldn't estimate the actual number of MRSA patients he sees, from the jails or otherwise, but he says, "I do know that it's increasing, and it's something we're very aware of."

Former inmate Jay Carey had an MRSA infection when he entered the jail. Despite telling jail employees about the contagious and deadly infection, he says he was left in the general jail population and didn't see a jail physician until the day before his release.

In a court complaint, Carey also says a jail nurse then told him and his attorney, "We handle these MRSA cases all the time. We know what we're doing."

In all fairness, MRSA thrives in jails and prisons across the country. It's just that other jails are doing something about the problem. For example:

• Los Angeles County Jail authorities identified MRSA as a major problem in 2002, and invited federal and clinical researchers in to help study and contain the MRSA "superbug."

• In October of this year, the Tulsa County Jail in Oklahoma scrubbed its entire 1,700-cell facility with a chemical bacteria killer that targeted MRSA.

• County jails in Kentucky created a MRSA training course so corrections officers can identify MRSA-infected inmates within 24 hours and take them to health officials.

Meanwhile, Maricopa County inmates report skin infections weeks before treatment — if they get medical attention at all. As the infections ooze, they contaminate the overcrowded cells and spread to other inmates.

Recent figures estimate that 70 percent of inmates are pretrial detainees. Meaning many of them will soon walk out of court hearings and back to their lives outside jail.

One inmate tells of getting the infection on her buttock after she sat on a toilet in the jail. Inmates with skin infections interviewed for this story reported a two-to-three-week wait to see a jail physician — even after filling out medical requests to report staph or skin infections.

"The operation of the jail facilities is a constitutional mandate of the sheriff and the delivery of medical services within the jail system falls within that constitutional mandate," Arpaio wrote in an October 7, 2004, memo to the County Board of Supervisors.

This proves that Sheriff Joe Arpaio clearly understands that he is responsible for the conditions in his jails — even though he does little to improve them.

The decrepit health and sanitary conditions within Arpaio's jails breed lawsuits as well as disease.

The cost to taxpayers to finance this culture of cruelty is $41.4 million, and counting.

The $41.4 million is just the edge of the cesspool — a single result of standards that have long made Arpaio's jails the target of investigations from both the federal government and advocates like Amnesty International.