While we were in Wisconsin, my mother-in-law expressed a very common resentment of people who commit crimes, go to prison, and then get free medical care there. If you think about it, there isn’t any choice about giving medical care to prisoners. They can’t go out and get it for themselves, so the state has to bring it to them. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to let a prisoner who was really sick go untreated. It just can’t be any other way, and that’s just an expense of having a prison in the first place.
The proof of that is this case. I’m no doctor, but I know that the proper treatment for penile cancer is not an extra allotment of boxer shorts.
Yes, prisoners are people who have done bad things and been duly convicted for it. They are deprived of their liberty and confined to prisons as punishment, which in my opinion is a pretty awful thing to do to someone. I’ve no doubt that whatever this guy did, it was bad and I’ll stipulate that he deserved to be punished for it. But no prisoner anywhere should be sentenced to death this way.
