And rumors even circulated that some prisoners who had previously been denied medical care were coincidentally beginning treatment that very same day. But the charade was unsuccessful. From the onset, the corrections department was clearly on the defensive. Compounding this stigma is the fact that the women's Medical Technical Assistants are also trained prison guards and responsible for their punishment, a duality not practiced in any other large state, according to Dr. Corey Weinstein, a consultant to many Bay Area prisoners' rights groups. Thus, treatable illnesses become terminal and HIV regimens are sometimes prescribed without any thought to how they might interact with other medications or health conditions.
Women often have to walk across prison grounds to get back to their cells after major surgery.
Pain medication is not available to them should they happen to return from surgery between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., testified the prison's own doctor. Breast lumps and vaginal tumors are left untreated for months, often addressed only when survival is no longer an option. A woman with cancer was dropped post-surgery, causing her stitches to tear open. Many women discovered by accident that they tested positive for certain diseases and never were told. Others are still waiting to be retested four years after the prison discovered that its contracted laboratory faked hundreds of HIV, hepatitis, and cancer results.