THE SHAMING OF JACK KENNEDY - by ROLF KAESTEL - Government - http://maxpages.com/lifemeanslife/The_Shaming_of_Jack

Inmate Jack Kennedy was an aging prisoner who was diagnosed as terminally ill from cancer and a serious liver and kidney problem shortly after his commitment to the Arkansas Department of Correction. By late 1991, however, the healthcare provider was still unwilling to give the expensive medications and treatments he needed to maintain any hope for a fight to survive his incarceration. He came to inquire of me whether it might be possible to initiate a legal action on his behalf to compel the State to not simply allow him to die. I agreed to help him.

I advised that he get his family and friends to initiate action to attempt to have him released under Title 12 of the Arkansas code. Pursuant to a relatively new statute, (now A.C.A. 12-29-404 as revised in 1995), any terminally ill prisoner could be released if two doctors independently affirmed that the inmate was terminally ill and would most probably die within twelve months; or if he was so old or infirm that he would otherwise qualify for placement in a nursing home. Although he had barely begun serving his sentence at this time, I expressed that this law might well be utilized in his case due to his age and once some pressure was put on the State to give him the cancer and other treatments that he required and which the State was doing everything possible to avoid because of the expense.

Among the medications Jack was prescribed by the Infirmary staff was a particularly potent diuretic. The drug compelled him to have to proceed to the toilets within a few minutes of eating a meal and taking the pills. Because of his particular afflictions involving his kidneys, liver, and bladder the addition of the diuretic sometimes made releasing his bowel or bladder beyond his voluntary control. He simply needed to get to a bathroom quickly when the need came.

Across the next two weeks I had no occasion to talk to Jack again because our jobs and barracks assignments did not usually allow us to encounter each other in a normal day. However, one day Jack came out to the School where I worked, and asked to speak to me privately.

After we had gone to an uncrowded spot, he began to talk, but his words immediately choked. He was trying so desperately to stem the flood of tears welling into his eyes, but when they did spill over he began to weep uncontrollably.

After regaining some control over his emotions he began to tell me about the endless anguish and feeling of shame over all that he had experienced during the past few months, but particularly over what had just occurred to him that day. Jack was a strong man and not of the same cut as many of the other prisoners of the ADC. He had endured well the trials and turmoil of having been incarcerated so late in his life and being sent to such an alien place, not to mention the herculean endurance and strength it took to deal with his terminal illness and the pain and suffering that those things put him through, in addition to the trauma of his confinement. For the type of man that he was, to make him weep took some doing. Being shamed in the way that he had been earlier in this day was apparently too much.

I listened quietly to what Jack had to say, reassuring him once in a while that I understood his anguish and that he just needed to let it out. Finally, after some few minutes of recounting what had happened to him that day, he regained his composure and dignity, stirred as much by anger over what had happened as anything else.

To better understand the unforgivable callousness of Jack's experience, the reader should understand that for many years now, Arkansas' prisons have become regular "show" places for the scores of tours that are conducted each year. Not only do lawmakers and some of their ilk seem to have a compulsion to get a first-hand look at what their twisted legislation is doing to the scapegoats of their election strategies, but tours are regularly conducted for juveniles, civic groups, high school and college students, and just for people who get a kick and thrill from coming to a real world of horror and suffering in a prison instead of seeing it only in Hollywood movies. "See the animals behind the bars; look, but don't touch, and don't get too close!"

Usually, when one of these instructive and of course, honest and unbiased tours is conducted, the entire prison is quickly brought into tidiness and order and the inmates are all locked down - or more often locked away - so that those who conduct the tours can explain that they are all being slave-driven in the fields, and that they are compelled to live in military-like surroundings under total domination by guards who risk their lives daily to protect them from these killers and rapists, blah-blah-blah. How often have I seen that glint and gleam in the eyes of those who conduct the tours relishing the awe, and "gee, you are my hero and protector," looks on the faces of immature and naive children or would-be adults who swallow the propaganda like it was the gospel. Little do they understand that if the prisoners were in fact the types of rabid animals they make them out to be "for effect", both the tours, guards, and everything else would instantly be in their jaws for the prisoners to do with what they would. Little has society ever known that it is not fear of death, nor fences, nor tough guards and security that keeps millions of prisoners confined, but the last remaining threads of decency in most of them - a weird and psychological distortion I've come to call the Holocaust Syndrome, (the latter element being especially true in Arkansas, for some reason.) It's all mostly a public image and tour hype and whitewashed facade. Bottom line, the tours are not going to be permitted to see or to know anything other than what our keepers want them to. They continue to live their own delusions.

Sometimes the lock-downs and whitewashed "fronts" put up by officials are engaged several hours in advance of the tours. Inmates who work nights are made to get out of their beds despite needing sleep so as to avoid the appearance that even a single "damn convict" is not slaving away at some 12 to 15 hour daytime job. Everyone must put on their shirts and pants and be in regulation dress. Masses of prisoners are simply run out to the yard or some other location where the tour will not be taken.

On November 15, 1991, Jack had just returned from lunch and pill call where he was administered the diuretic and other medication that he had to take three times a day. He proceeded to his Barracks 8 on the West Hall as usual, knowing that in 10 or 15 minutes he would be required to go to the bathroom to allow the diuretic to do its work. It had already become such a routine that he did not even consciously think about it any more, even though it bothered him to have so little control over even his own bodily functions.

Within a few moments after returning to his barracks, the correctional officers on station outside Jack's barracks began to holler "Lock-down!" and to go about the usual routines inside the barracks of telling the porters to "move their asses" and make spotless any area that was in view of the main hallways; waking up the night shift workers and telling them to get dressed and get their beds made and informing everyone that they had best sit properly on the edges of their racks. After years of the drill and after hundreds of prisoners had been cited with disciplinary infractions for contrived rules violations for not reacting quickly enough, everyone in 8 Barracks quickly got into gear. A tour was expected, they were told, and the guards had been given the usual orders.

About 15 minutes later, Jack had to proceed to the bathroom to relieve himself because the diuretic had finished its work. He arose from his rack and proceeded to the toilet area, which was a small room extended off the west wall of the barracks proper. With the shower walls constructed as they were , with the bars set as they were, and with the two windows looking out upon the main hallway being set as high as they were, an actual effort had to be made by anyone looking from the main hallway to see anyone that might have been sitting on the toilet or using the urinals.

Noting Jack heading to the restroom - an area that was to be kept spotless and unused any time a tour was passing through - the officer ordered Jack to immediately get back to his bed. Not at first comprehending what was going on, Jack looked at the officer thinking that he was talking to someone else, only to be cussed at and threatened with a disciplinary report for disobeying a direct order if he did not do as ordered post-haste. Jack was already almost beyond his last ability to hold his bowels, but he went to the bars and pulled out his medical script showing that he was on diuretics and needed to go to the bathroom or else soil his pants. However, the guard responded that he did not give a damn about the medical script and repeated the order for Jack to return to his bunk, and if he did not do so immediately the guard would come in there and drag him back there himself. Jack was simply not going to mess up "MY clean bathroom!" It didn't matter to the guard that the expected tour was not even on the Cummins Unit property yet, never mind on the Cummins Unit yet.

Not wanting more trouble and suffering than he was already being required to endure, and not having the streak that would let him tell the guard to go screw himself (in which case Jack would probably have been allowed to go to the bathroom), Jack proceeded to his bunk in much distress because he was losing control of his bowels. By the time he had made it back to his bed, his mostly liquid feces had already begun to run into his pants. So, in a final moment of panic Jack grabbed the only object nearby that he could - a #10 tin can used by the prisoners for cigarette butts and trash. He pulled down his pants, squatted down and defecated into the can, not being able to make it all go inside the narrow opening and thereby further soiling his clothes and shoes.

Not realizing what had really happened, some of the more calloused prisoners began to laugh and tease Jack about it, and in the shame that followed Jack simply returned to his rack, laid down and tried to forget what had happened to him. The shame that he had been made to feel cut deeply indeed. The guard had apparently seen what Jack had to do and did not again order him to sit up on his rack like everyone else, in part because Jack's bed was at the far rear of the barracks.

After Jack had finished his account, I determined to initiate a lawsuit for him in order to inflict the same kind of shame upon prison officials as they had made Jack feel, (which is why I'm writing this article). Since I am of the opinion that the warden of an institution is responsible for the actions of the employees under his supervision, I prepared the suit for Jack only against the officer involved and against Warden Willis Sargent, even though several other persons bore potential legal liability.

After Warden Sargent was served with the suit bringing out the callousness and shame of having required an aging and terminally ill prisoner to have had to defecate into a tin can and to soil himself just because some google-eyed tour was to take place that day (which never showed up, by the way), he went completely "south", I was informed. (Just as they will "go south" when they read this on the internet). He immediately initiated action against me for having prepared the suit for Jack, and he initiated a transfer of Jack to the Diagnostic Unit - in largest part not because he cared about Jack, but because he did not want Jack and I to be able to communicate regarding the lawsuit. (Since inmate-to-inmate contact between prisons is forbidden, this is a favorite tactic of officials in these kinds of circumstances, and it is also a tactic of prisoners to take advantage of this good ol' boy practice to get prisoners in need, like Jack transferred to where they might be better treated or helped.) Although this creep and then-Prison Director A.L. Lockhart issued direct orders to have me neutralized for daring to stand against the ADC, Warden Sargent was a little more cautious and informed him that "I do not advise this because I feel that doing so would only add fuel to whatever fires Kaestel is trying to start."

(Within a few months Lockhart was investigated for criminal felony misconduct and resigned from office, and Warden Sargent was finally transferred away from Cummins Unit.)

However, as Jack had agreed to try to accomplish with the lawsuit and the way officials could be predicted to react, he was transferred to a place where he always should have been; in the Diagnostic Unit where a large part of the staff there, although also largely callous and uncaring, is medical personnel.

I lost contact with Jack and do not know the outcome of his lawsuit, but I was informed via the grapevine that he shortly thereafter died of his terminal illnesses still incarcerated, so he could not likely have lived long enough to allow for the exceedingly slow wheels of justice to roll around to doing what was right. So, his lawsuit was likely mooted by death.

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