THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 11, 1995 TAG: 9512110031
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 151 lines
In November, less than a week after inmate Robert Alston was pronounced well enough to leave the Medical College of Virginia and return to prison, his family went to visit him at Powhatan Correctional Center.
They were stunned by what they found.
Alston, whose HIV status escalated into AIDS after he contracted an airborne virus called histoplasmosis during a 1994 epidemic at Powhatan, did not recognize his family.
His hands lay inert and twisted on the tray of his geriatric wheelchair, and saliva spilled from his mouth. He had trouble keeping his eyes open. His speech was distorted. Every few minutes, his emaciated body stiffened uncontrollably, causing him to slide down in the chair.
``Sometimes I feel like I'm ready to give up, you know?'' Alston, 30, had said in an earlier telephone interview. ``Like it's no use. But I struggle on, for my family.''
Alston is one of 31 inmates who have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Richmond, claiming that Powhatan Warden Donald R. Guillory and his staff had been told of the possibility of a histoplasmosis outbreak eight months before it happened.
Histoplasmosis - a sometimes fatal infection characterized by high fever, headache, dizziness, chest pains and pneumatic lung patches - is caused by inhaling a fungus found in decayed bird and bat droppings. When soil containing such droppings is disturbed, the fungus becomes airborne.
It began to affect employees and inmates at Powhatan in June 1994. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the epidemic was started when a pile of fungus-infested dirt and debris was moved from the courtyard of M Building on June 8 and then deposited in front of the institution's medical building on June 14.
It probably still would be there now, staff and inmates say, if Corrections Chief Ron Angelone had not been hired in the spring of 1994. Worried that Angelone might stop by their prisons unannounced, wardens across the state began massive cleanup and painting projects. A lot of work was needed at M Building.
The squalid conditions inside M Building, where Powhatan keeps its maximum-security inmates, have been documented at length in recent lawsuits. A petition filed last summer on behalf of now-deceased death row inmate Willie Lloyd Turner described the place as ``a hell on Earth'' where inmates throw so much feces from their cells that prison guards wear face masks ``to escape the flying dung'' and ``the Styrofoam containers in which Mr. Turner's food was served were frequently covered with feces.''
Turner's petition describes prisoners chained to their beds and lying in their own waste, and a single shower for 26 people which is ``filthy, covered with human waste, frequently stopped up and shared by those with communicable diseases.''
M Building's courtyard, long a mecca for sparrows, pigeons and small blackbirds, had for years been coated with a layer of chalky white droppings. The birds have been kept out by fishing wire since 1992, but their droppings remained.
On June 8, five prison employees and two inmates shoveled the dirt pile in the courtyard into a flatbed trailer. Hours later, one of the employees collapsed.
In all, 22 inmates and six prison employees were hospitalized with the infection. Another 151 came down with less severe cases.
According to the lawsuit, Powhatan's warden and at least three members of his medical staff - Chief Physician Dr. David Barnes, Dr. Leon M. Dixon and Powhatan Hospital Administrator William Welch - were warned by MCV officials in October that conditions at the prison could result in a histoplasmosis outbreak.
Concerned because several of the prison's AIDS patients had come down with the virus, an MCV ``investigative medical team'' explained to Guillory and his doctors how fungal spores from bird droppings ``develop, travel through the air, and invade the human body,'' according to the lawsuit. The team also ``directed the cleanup of a small area between the medical unit and M building with formalin solution.''
After that, the lawsuit says, Guillory and his staff allowed the bird droppings to accumulate, and made no more efforts to clean them up.
The inmates are asking for monetary damages. They charge that prison officials were negligent in failing to protect them from a known danger.
Alston, a Suffolk native serving 59 years on an array of crack-related burglary and theft charges, was moved to a strip cell in the M building basement one month after the outbreak began. At the time, he was recovering from knee surgery and had recently been diagnosed as HIV-positive. Inmates with histoplasmosis symptoms languished in adjacent cells. Within weeks, Alston had symptoms, too. By mid-August, he tested positive for the infection.
As a result of his exposure to histoplasmosis, the lawsuit alleges, Alston ``has a severely limited life expectancy.''
Other inmates, the suit claims, also have been weakened, disabled and made more vulnerable to medical problems.
Inmate David Selby had his gall bladder removed ``allegedly because of repeated bouts of histoplasmosis.'' Another inmate, Gary Newell, has contracted diabetes, allegedly for the same reason.
Cary Bowen, a Richmond lawyer who is representing the inmates, says he is outraged by the indifference prison officials have shown to his clients and to all inmates.
``If, in fact, the way a society treats its prisoners is a gauge of the degree of its civilization, then we really need to look closely at what's happening with a case like this,'' Bowen says.
``Prisoners are not trash. They are human beings, and we brutalize them to our own peril because they are still part of the human community and most of them are going to come back to live with us. What goes around comes around. You can't kill them all. And you can't deny parole to every single one of them.''
During their November visit, Robert Alston's two younger brothers sat on a bench against the wall and wept. His five sisters gathered around his chair, murmuring reassurances, stroking his head and holding a cup beneath his mouth. Their father, alone and stonefaced, sat in a corner of the room, watching.
``He wasn't like this before,'' said his sister, Chesapeake resident Rongelar Kelly. ``Before he left MCV, he was talking, he was in his right mind, he was OK enough to cut his own hair. He wasn't in no Pampers. He wasn't slobbering.''
After a time, Alston's mind began to focus. He told his sisters that the prison medical staff had been keeping him drugged, tied to a bed, lying in his own vomit. The drugs - powerful sedatives which they forced him to take - were responsible for his deteriorating condition, he said. Minutes earlier, he said, they had threatened to forbid him from seeing his family unless he swallowed another pill.
Alston's father, James Chapman, asked to see a nurse about his son's medication, but no nurse appeared. Finally, a correctional officer told him the drugs were prescribed by the hospital's director. Prison policy forbids officials to release to the public any medical information about inmates.
Kelly wants her brother home before he dies. The family has applied for medical clemency three times, but without success. For more than a year, they have asked for his medical records, also without success. Kelly says she is tired of fighting, and is worried that prison officials are retaliating against her brother for all the letters and phone calls she has made in his behalf.
``But even though I'm tired of fighting the system, it's something I have to do,'' said Kelly. ``All his life, in and out, he has spent in jail. He's tired too. And there's so little left for him.'' ILLUSTRATION: Robert Alston
KEYWORDS: LAWSUIT HISTOPLASMOSIS by CNB