If You’re Sent to Jail, You Have to Take Your Medicine
For every story of the human condition, there must be a moral. I’m sure there’s one somewhere in Jeffrey Knipe’s recent experience in Orange County Jail, but which one?
About 10 days ago, Knipe and roommate Alan Potter were walking their dog in Garden Grove Park about 4:30 in the morning. Knipe, 32, has AIDS and is given to irregular sleeping patterns, so walking the dog at that hour wasn’t unusual for him.
Unfortunately for him, the park was closed, and he and Potter were stopped by a Garden Grove policeman. Potter was released but Knipe was detained on a two-year-old warrant out for him because he had never paid a fine of $170 for walking his dog without a leash in 1990. Knipe said the violation roughly coincided with the initial diagnosis that he was HIV-positive, and with a subsequent bout with pneumonia, and that he just let the leash matter slip as being unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
That’s the preamble.
After Garden Grove police brought Knipe back to the station about 5 a.m., they decided to send him over immediately to County Jail. As an AIDS patient, Knipe is on a rigorous schedule of AZT, the most well-known AIDS combatant, as well as other medication.
When he got to County Jail about 5:30, Knipe got a routine medical workup. He told the medical technician that he was an AIDS patients taking AZT every four hours and that he was scheduled for his next dosage in an hour. The med tech told him she couldn’t administer the drug to him and that, according to Knipe, “if I wanted it, I should have brought my own.”
Meanwhile, Potter had to wait for the banks to open to get the $420 in bail money, but when he arrived midmorning to bail out Knipe, he was told that he hadn’t been booked yet.
Around 2:30, Knipe said, some nine hours after arriving, he was booked. About an hour later, Potter posted the bond and Knipe was released.
By then, he had missed three AZT treatments.
Knipe isn’t claiming any particular life-shortening result from missing his treatments. All he knows is that the drug supposedly slows the disease and that the instructions are to take it faithfully every four hours.
Ernest Williams, the medical director of the county’s Correctional Medical Services, didn’t return my phone call to him.
However, Dr. George Gellert, deputy health officer for the county’s Health Care Agency, agreed to address the matter and minced no words.
He said it would be “fair to say” that being deprived of medication could cause a person some stress, but added, “I think to a certain extent, frankly, the individual has to be responsible both for having the medicine accessible and, secondarily, and more importantly, to make sure he hasn’t violated the law . . . “ that landed him in jail in the first place.
Gellert went on to say he isn’t an AIDS expert but didn’t think “that depriving (someone) of treatment for eight to nine hours is going to significantly affect the course of the disease.”
He said AZT is expensive and that he “couldn’t see how you could justify having just AZT and not a whole series of medications” for other conditions. “Why just AZT? Why not digitalis for people with heart conditions, or antibiotics for people with pulmonary infections or anti-TB medication for people with TB? . . . And frankly, how could you in fact afford to have such a capability?”
Gellert said the corrections health program is designed to provide “humane and appropriate treatment” for inmates “who are inside for certain, committed stays” but isn’t geared to the high-volume, fast turnover that the jail system sees in any given day.
Knipe now knows this. He said his reason for complaining publicly is to draw attention to the situation.
“I don’t care about myself,” he said. “The point is, I’m already dead (because he has full-blown AIDS). I’m dying. The point is, how many other people has this happened to? They should change their policy on this. If their policy is that they don’t give it, where’s a doctor? They should have a doctor on call.”
Dave Barton, a member and frequent unofficial spokesman for the Orange County ACTUP chapter, an AIDS activist group, said, “If (Knipe) said he had AIDS and he let them know it, there’s no excuse for them to say you’re only going to be here 12 hours and there’s no reason to take the medicine. . . . If you have someone in your custody, you have a responsibility to take care of their health while they’re there. To say, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own,’ is irresponsible.”
The moral, the moral.
This is a county that’s crying for jail space and Knipe spends a big chunk of the day in the tank because of a two-year-old leash violation? Is the justice system so ponderous and soulless that there wasn’t some way to exact the fine from Knipe without throwing him in jail?
Yes, Knipe screwed up by not paying his leash fine. No, he shouldn’t be exempted because he has AIDS.
But there’s a goofy imbalance between what he did and what he went through.
Maybe you have no sympathy for Knipe. Maybe you’re saying he didn’t pay the fine when he was supposed to; he got what he deserved.
If that’s your thinking, then the moral to this story is simple:
If you’ve got AIDS and you know you’re going to die, pal, make damn sure you’ve got your dog on a tight leash.