Getting out of prison raises some potentially problematic medical questions. For instance, if you are in a halfway house, are you required to have your own medical insurance or not? Depending on whom you ask within the prison bureaucratic morass, you will get different answers. I have heard of halfway house residents being more or less threatened with punishment should they use their own healthcare insurance and providers. I have seen statements from lawyers, government entities, and advocacy groups claiming that halfway house residents must provide their own insurance. For instance cms.gov (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) says, yeah, you should have your own insurance. Who really knows? Biblically, the left hand and right hand not communicating is a good thing; in the scared world of criminal justice, not so much, though it’s quite common.
Not that it bothers me terribly. I got inured to the absurd inconsistencies of Justice Department healthcare while I was doing time. Because literacy is such a struggle in the carceral system, the Bureau of Prisons was nice enough to draw a picture to explain their overarching wellness philosophy for me. The only problem is that I’m not sure that anybody in the Bureau of Prisons understood what they were drawing. This image used to hang in the waiting area of medical section of a federal prison I know:
Aside from the mixing of mythological metaphors going on here, I’m just in love with the handcuffs being the counterweight to the stethoscope…or vice versa. So I guess the heavier the crime the better the medicine? The better the doctoring, the more you have to serve behind bars? Not sure either works, but then again I’ve always been pretty uncertain about with the Department of Justice is trying to say.
I’m fundamentally and perversely pleased by the way that custody and care are represented as polar opposites. This is just one of those logos that tells the truth without meaning to, one of those representations that unmasks the unspoken thoughts of those who adopt it. Whatever it was intended to mean, it shows us that custody certainly cannot be equated with care, nor care with custody. If either of those were true equivalents, we’d just have one pan in the picture. I also dig how the text at the top is off center, wanting to appear balanced but weighing more heavily on the custody side of things. That really hits the mark. Just ask anybody who has been incarcerated during COVID. The number of federal prisoners who have been infected with the coronavirus far outstrips the number of officially reported cases, but the Bureau of Prisons represents itself as a smoothly balanced operation when it comes to massive pandemic outbreaks. Of course I take solace in the face of such misrepresentations by knowing that the BOP has already told me that if inmates want more care, they need to prepared for more custody.
At some point this sign disappeared from the waiting area. I found that to be a relief except that it seems to have been covering up a decal that was underneath it and which nobody appears to have been able to remove (though the attempts are erasure looked to be half-heated at best). It was a promotional decal for cheaperthandirt.com, a website designed to take care of all your firearms, ammo, and survival gear needs. I can guarantee you that no inmate put that up. So, yeah, maybe custody is a step down from care, but it’s a step up from vigilantism. And it’s all to be found in your one-stop shop, a medical facility in a federal prison.