"Dogs get better care"

The next President of the United States needs to earn some international goodwill fast. It's going to take a while to clean up the messes from the current Administration.

The latest example is the medical treatment--or lack thereof--of detainees in the custody of the Division of Internee Health Services (DIHS), a branch of the lobotomized giant, the Department of Homeland Security. According to today's Washington Post, prisoners jammed into a variety of prison facilities scattered across the United States are, surprise surprise, don't get adequate medical care. Some prisoners have died for want of simple, inexpensive treatment.

Secrecy can be just a veil disguising incompetence, corruption, and failure. (Immigrants from the former Soviet Union can tell you a thing or two about this topic.) In this case, the increased strictures for detainees--more limited access to lawyers, or anyone on the outside--has helped hide the lack of medical care for people we casually keep in indefinite custody. And, of course, we're not talking about people who are major threats to US national security:

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somalian without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

As with all longer news articles, you have to read far beyond the first paragraph to find the important details. For example, it's worth doing a quick calculation of how much per capita this part of DHS is spending on these prisoners' medical care, and then compare it to how much US prisons spend on their prisoners:

• For people who are not guilty of any crime other than being in the United States illegally: about $286 per prisoner. (That's the size of expenditures cited in the article, divided by 311,000 prisoners.)
  
• For prisoners in US state facilities, guilty of everything from petty theft to murder: between $1,000 and  $4,000 per prisoner, depending on the state. (Those numbers come from a 2001 Department of Justice report.)

Unfortunately for American prestige, people in other countries can do the math, too.

And, of course, there's the tragically familiar story of an under-qualified person in charge of a government agency with life-and-death responsibilities. 

The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position.

If those details don't worry you, click here for an article critical of Flanagan's handling of Baltimore prisons.

It won't be easy to fix the DIHS. The US government could save a lot of money, simply by releasing prisoners...But, of course, there are the inevitable political repercussions. The federal officials might try to bring up the level of funding and staffing for the DIHS, but where will they find the money? And where will they find a better-qualified person willing to take on the thankless job of heading the DIHS?

Mister or Madame President-To-Come, godspeed to you.