Lawsuit Challenges Lack of Medication Treatment for Substance Use Disorders in Va. Prisons
In this July 23, 2018, photo, nurse Brian Toia holds tabs of buprenorphine, a drug which controls heroin and opioid cravings, as he prepares to administer the drug, known also by the brand name Suboxone, to selected inmates at the Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Mass. American correctional institutions are slowly loosening resistance to giving inmates medication for their opioid addiction. (Photo:Elise Amendola/AP)
There’s been a dramatic increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths in prisons and jails over the last two decades. But despite those increases, many facilities do not permit clinically-proven medications for dependency.
Sharp Rise in Overdose Deaths In Jails and Prisons
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D C jail covid lockdown: Inmates confined to their cells 23 hours a day for a year
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Tyquine Lee, 28, spent over 600 days in solitary at Red Onion prison in Virginia from 2016 to 2018.
Red Onion is a supermax prison treated as an end of the line facility within the penal system.
61,000 adults and children are held in segregation in US prisons, according to the most recent data.
When Takeisha Brown finally got to visit her son, Tyquine Lee, at the Red Onion State Prison, Virginia, she didn t recognize him. I saw someone that wasn t my son. He was just so small. He was rambling in numbers. He had a language of his own.
The history of how Virginia acquired its first electric chair
Virginia s ultimate sanction was carried out for more than a century on an oak chair from Trenton, N.J. used to execute 267 people who were deemed too vile or dangerous to live among us.
Their limbs and torsos bound by straps and heads crowned with a metal helmet and brine-soaked sponge, the last moments and thoughts of some of the state s most egregious criminals were spent in an electric chair first installed at the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1908.
If the chair was a symbol of extreme, immutable justice, it was also a tool of racial intimidation for much of its history. In modern times, a more diverse group of offenders were electrocuted or killed by injection on a gurney first used in 1995.