Author: Marcus T
I broke my hand about four years ago. Got it caught in a heavy door in the cell block at Georgia State Prison down in Reidsville, where I been locked up for going on seven years now. You can call me Marcus.
The pain hit me right away — sharp, then throbbing. My hand swelled up fast. I filled out a sick call request that same day. Wrote that my hand was broken, swelling bad, I need to see a doctor. In here, that’s how it works. You write down what’s wrong on paper forms and drop them in a box in the chow hall. Then you wait.
Nothing happened.
A couple days later I put in another one. Still nothing. My hand kept swelling. It turned purple. I couldn’t move my fingers. The COs on the block could see it was messed up. One of them told me straight up, “Medical is backed up, just wrap it yourself.” Wrap it myself? With what? I tore up a t-shirt and tried to make a splint with a piece of cardboard, but that don’t do nothing for broken bones.
I must have put in six or seven requests over about three weeks. Some of the other guys on the block even tried to tell the officers it was getting worse. Nobody cared. They just said it was out of their hands.
Three weeks. My hand swelled up twice its size. Some nights I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t write letters home. I couldn’t hold a book right. Simple stuff like buttoning my shirt or tying my shoes became a struggle.
What finally happened was my cellie — the guy I share a cell with, I’ll call him D — he called his mama on the outside and told her what was going on. She called the prison, called the warden’s office, started making noise. I think she even called some legal aid place. That phone call cost him. Calls ain’t free in here and his family don’t got much money. But he did it without me even asking.
About two days after that, a CO came to my cell and said “pack up, you’re going to medical.” Just like that, after three weeks.
When the doctor finally looked at my hand he shook his head. He said the fractures had already started to set and there wasn’t much they could do without re-breaking the bones and doing surgery. They said the prison didn’t have the budget to send me out for that kind of procedure. So they gave me some ibuprofen, put a proper splint on it way too late, and sent me back to my cell.
That was it. Three broken bones in my hand and all I got was some ibuprofen and a splint three weeks too late.
I just sat there staring at him. I remember thinking, so that’s it? My hand is just gonna be messed up forever because y’all couldn’t be bothered? I didn’t even say nothing at first. I was too angry to talk. Then I asked him, I said “so what am I supposed to do?” And he just kind of looked at me with this sorry expression and said “we’ll manage the pain.”
Manage the pain. That’s all they had for me.
Now my right hand don’t work right and probably never will. Some nights I can’t sleep because the pain is real bad and all they give me is Tylenol. It aches every time it gets cold. I’m 34 years old. I came in here when I was 27. I got a 20-year sentence. I’m up for parole in about four more years but ain’t no guarantees with that. So I could be in here until I’m 47 if I do the whole thing. My hand already don’t work right at 34. What’s gonna happen to me in another 20 years if they can’t even fix a broken bone now?
I filed a grievance about the whole thing and it got denied. They said medical responded within an “appropriate timeframe.” Three weeks is appropriate? I appealed it and that got denied too. The whole grievance system is a joke — they investigate themselves and find nothing wrong.
I tried to write to the state ombudsman but I never heard nothing back. One of the guys in the law library told me I could file a lawsuit for deliberate indifference to a serious medical need, but I don’t know the first thing about filing a lawsuit. I can barely write with my hand the way it is now. The law library is this little room with a bunch of old law books and a couple computers that barely work. You gotta sign up for time slots and you only get like an hour every other week. Trying to figure out how to file legal paperwork in there is like trying to teach yourself to be a doctor from a first aid book. And getting medical records from the prison? Good luck. They make it as hard as possible. I put in records requests and either they get lost or they come back with half the pages missing. It feels like the whole system is designed to keep you from holding them accountable.
I know I’m not the only one. There are guys all up and down that block dealing with the same thing — bad teeth rotting out of their heads, infections that don’t get treated, guys with diabetes not getting their insulin on time.
One that really sticks with me was this older guy we called Pops. He was maybe 60 years old, been down a long time. He had real bad chest pains one night, couldn’t breathe right, sweating through his clothes. We were banging on the doors trying to get somebody’s attention. It took over an hour before a CO even came to check. They finally called medical but all they did was give him some antacid and tell him it was probably heartburn. Two days later it happened again and this time they had to rush him out to a hospital. Turned out he’d had a heart attack that first night. A whole heart attack and they gave him antacid.
Pops survived but he was never the same after that. He got weaker, moved slower. They moved him to a bottom bunk, at least they did that much. But he was on all these new medications and half the time they wouldn’t come on schedule. He’d be asking for his heart pills and they’d tell him the med cart was running late or they didn’t have his prescription filled yet. It was scary watching that because you could see the fear in his eyes every time his chest would tighten up. He ended up getting transferred to another facility about six months later — I heard it was one that had a better medical unit. But it took a heart attack to get him there.
I think about Pops a lot because that could be any of us in here. You get old enough or sick enough in prison and it feels like they’re just waiting for you to die quiet so they don’t have to deal with you.
I’m a human being, not some animal you just patch up and throw back in a cage. It’s like once you come in here, your body just don’t matter to nobody no more.
But we take care of each other in here because nobody else will. Me and D been cellies for about four years now. In here that’s like family. You’re in a space smaller than most people’s bathroom, sharing everything — the air, the noise, the stress. You learn real quick if you can trust somebody or not. D is good people. That’s the kind of thing that keeps you human in a place that’s trying to strip all that away from you. We look out for each other, share commissary when one of us is short, keep each other’s heads right when things get dark. I know that sounds simple but in here, having somebody you can trust with your life — and I mean that literally — is everything.
The guys in the law library, the jailhouse lawyers, they share what they know for free. Some of them still got fire in them. They believe if they can just find the right case law, the right argument, they can win something. And sometimes they do — I seen guys get small victories, get a ruling that says the prison has to do something different. But most of the time it’s an uphill battle and people get worn down. The guys who been fighting for years and keep getting denied, you can see it in their eyes — they’re tired. But they keep going because what else are you gonna do? Just sit in your cell and take it?
For me personally, I go back and forth. Some days I feel like fighting, some days I just want to do my time and get out with whatever’s left of me. I try to take care of myself best I can — I exercise in the yard, I drink water, I stay away from the commissary junk food as much as I can afford to. But what good does all that do when the system itself won’t take care of you when something goes wrong?
That’s part of why when I heard about this program, Tell My Story, I wanted to do it. Because maybe if enough people hear what’s really going on in these places, something might change. I ain’t holding my breath on that, but at least my story would be out there. At least somebody would know what happened to me and to Pops and to all the other guys going through this.
We’re still people in here, even if the system don’t treat us like it.