NY Inmate Died After 7 Days of Being Neglected, Denied Schizophrenia Medication as Punishment
A Rikers Island inmate was found unresponsive in his cell in September after being locked in without vital medication for seven straight days. It was revealed Thursday that Bradley Ballard reportedly made a lewd gesture to one of the guards and, as a form of punishment, was left in his cell alone for one week.
Guards continually checked in on Ballard, but he was not given some of his medication for schizophrenia. Ballard began to have a breakdown and purposely clogged his toilet so that it would not flush; he also removed all of his clothes and tied a rubber band around his genitals, cutting off circulation. By the time that guards found him in his cell on the seventh day, he was lying on the floor, covered in his own feces. His genitals were swollen and badly infected, and he died hours later at a hospital.
"He didn't have to leave the world like this," his mother Beverly Ann Griffin, told the Associated Press. "They could have put him in a mental hospital, got him some treatment. He was a caring young man."
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Unfortunately, Ballard's death is not the only one that has occurred at Rikers Island. Another inmate in a similar health unit died in his cell after the temperature reached 101 degrees because of malfunctioning equipment. The two deaths have led New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to promise reform, and Robin Campbell, Correction Department spokesman, said that Ballard's case is under investigation "so that a similar tragedy will not happen again."
"Correctional institutions are such a poor substitute for mental hospitals, which is what they're basically functioning as in our society," Dr. Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist noted. "The problem is the correction setting is not fit to deliver the proper care, and in fact many of the settings exacerbate their symptoms."
Not only did Ballard suffer from schizophrenia, he also had diabetes. A formal cause of death is still pending, but preliminary testing shows that he may have succumbed to sepsis, an infection throughout his body.
