A Cancer Grows (1): ... Although the silent and insidious killers of women--breast, ovarian and cervical cancer--are finally commanding pink-ribbon attention and activism in the outside world, inside prisons, women might as well be living in the dark ages. Healthcare for prisoners, male as well as female, is decidedly subpar, but women face exceptional hardships in a system based on a military design, with young and healthy men as the treatment model.

You know ... granted that young and healthy men are the treatment model, but frankly, I'd be shocked if women actually do receive substantially different care than the men in this matter. Granted, women have a much higher incidence of breast cancer, and granted that men can't get ovarian, uterine or cervical cancer; instead, they get prostate cancer and hyperplasia. I can't imagine that prison authorities care if a guy is starting to experience prostate cancer symptoms, or showing lung cancer symptoms. I'd expect that they confiscate a male prisoner's medications just as readily as a woman's, and ignore needs for chemotherapy. The problem isn't simply that women prisoners health care needs are ignored by prison authorities; the problem is that prisoners' health care needs are considered unimportant, regardless of who the prisoner is. If you die -- especially if you've been sentenced to a lengthy prison term -- why would they care? Just one less prisoner to deal with. They're actually fairly unlikely to sue; there will never be any certainty that treatment would have helped, or that it could have been maintained. There's simply no incentive for prison authorities to improve medical care, and every incentive to let it limp along this way when it comes to cancer and other expensive diseases to treat.

And leave us not simply blame the prisons. Society at large would certainly feel that it's not a good use of resources to spend money on prisoner treatments. After all, the prisoners are unlikely to spread cancer and such diseases in the community after they get out of jail; those diseases don't work that way. Unfortunately, this attitude means that diseases that do work that way, such as AIDS and tuberculosis or hepatitis C, don't get treated well, either -- again, it requires guards to monitor medication, and it's not cheap -- and many prisoners with those diseases do get out and spread them into the community. (Generally into the poor and minority sections, however, about which, again, we just don't care all that much. If they die, they die. C'est la vie and all that.)