Are there two worlds for criminals -- prison for the poor and the ordinary; prison hospital for the rich and the powerful? Judges determine a spell in a cell; the doctors give a bed head ticket to a ward.
To be precise a few days in the prison hospital with a transfer in an ambulance to the luxury room at the general hospital, at public expense. Most are fit as a fiddle until the court determines a detention.
Then sadly, health declines rapidly to require immediate hospitalization. Is this condition endemic to the powerful and the affluent? Ironically, medical science is yet to produce a research paper on this chronic ailment. Probably those who take the oath of hypocrisy prefer to leave the subject open for easy manipulation.
All those human rights devotees of foreign funding speaking on behalf of the conscience of prisoners have never raised this issue of such discrimination within the medico legal jurisdiction. Possibly their benefactors are interested in elevating comfort levels of those accustomed to living in comfort when placed in discomfort for an alleged misdemeanor or a proved offence.
It is not merely double standards but a service in honor of money or class or power.
It is open to the judiciary to test whether their order for incarceration is given effect or modified by medical intervention. It is open to Court to test the validity of a medical pronouncement. Conventionally and traditionally the Courts accept the opinion of the medical practitioner as a mark of respect to a professional man.
Herein lays the puzzle?
The entry to the prison and exit to the hospital is within hours or days if it happens to a swindler or a swinger from high, rich or powerful in society.
The period of rest and recuperation in hospital is infinite and indefinite. Often it is an incurable disease requiring continued occupation of a hospital bed during the period of incarceration. A collection of these bed head tickets should be exhibited in a museum of the underworld for a preparation of an article in the famed Lancet medical journal on public health of a VIP disease. Finding a drug for relief will be more baffling than for HIV.
Many other patients with similar diagnostic record will be discharged from public hospitals with long lists of waiting patients in search of hospital beds. These privileged detainees cannot be kept behind bars till the court discharges them to be sent home. So nursing care at public expense has to be administered to a jail bird irrespective of waiting patients with genuine ailments who suffer in agony without hospital care.
For this exclusive service on tax payer’s revenue, the requirements are a berth in jail on a court order with a medical certificate, not an illness on which hospitalization was required before the court order.
How many have gone from hospital to court and court to jail? The traditional route is from home to court- from court to remand or jail –from there to hospital.
I am taking a health insurance policy from a company that offers nursing attention before committing an offence. |
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