New Law Aims to Boost Institutional Sensitivities to Disabled Inmates : Prisons: But allegations of abuse persist. And longer sentences will boost population of older, ailing people.

Peter Grassia, a convicted robber, walked into the New York prison system three years ago but is not likely to walk out. Another prisoner at the Rikers Island facility in New York City knifed him in the back shortly after his arrest, paralyzing Grassia below the waist.

By Grassia’s account, which prison authorities strongly dispute, any hope that his injuries might win him sympathy and special consideration soon evaporated.

At the squat, remote Shawangunk Correctional Facility near this Hudson River Valley town, Grassia said, he has been denied catheters, access to showers when he loses rectal control and water needed to keep bedsores from becoming infected. He also said he was left on the floor for several hours when he fell trying to use the toilet.

When Grassia complained, he told a friend, the correctional officer in charge of his cell responded over a loudspeaker: “Hey, Grassia! Did you (defecate) in your pants yet? Need a new diaper, cripple?”

Such accusations are not unique in the state and federal prison systems. But renewed sensitivity about disability-rights issues is likely to make them more public and legally potent as even jailers attempt to adjust to a new law affecting the nation’s 43 million disabled people.

Lawyers have filed suit on Grassia’s behalf, and with passage in 1990 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the rights of prisoners in wheelchairs appears to present already overburdened prisons with a new drain on resources.

“It really is a problem,” said Ed Koren, staff attorney with the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Not only has jail yard violence added to the ranks of disabled prisoners, he said, “but as we put prisoners in for longer and longer periods of time, the prison population is going to be aging,” presumably resulting in more disabilities.

James Flateau, spokesman for the New York State Correctional Services Department, suggested that complaints by Grassia, 31, and other disabled prisoners at Shawangunk are motivated not by the new law but by a need to make trouble.

“We have 7,000 to 8,000 lawsuits filed by prisoners each year,” he said. “If they didn’t have the act to sue on, we feel confident they would have found another way to do so.”

Flateau said Thomas A. Coughlin III, the state correctional services commissioner, has a long record of attention to disability issues. “I think the New York prisons have been as responsive to the needs of the disabled and other inmates as any system in the country,” he said, citing special facilities for the severely disabled, prisoners with AIDS, the mentally ill and female prisoners who want to care for their infants.

But at Shawangunk’s C-2 unit, where authorities have placed the prison’s 14 inmates who use wheelchairs, disabled inmates insist they are mistreated precisely because they cannot move as fast as other prisoners.

Nate Wright, a convicted child molester with cerebral palsy, said in an interview in the prison visiting area that he cannot adequately clean himself in the 10 to 15 minutes he is given to shower every other day and is disciplined when he takes too long. “They can write you up for anything around here,” he said.

Disabled-rights lawyers suing prisons use not only the ADA but also Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of disabilities, and the constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.” But such cases move slowly, and disabled-rights activists have expressed concern about some recent decisions.

In July, the California Supreme Court ruled that Howard Andrews, 30, serving 15 years to life for second-degree murder, had a “fundamental right” to refuse medical assistance although, as a quadriplegic, he might die without it. Andrews fell or jumped from a third-tier cell at Folsom Prison in 1991 and intermittently refuses food and medicine.

Jean Stewart, a novelist and disabled-rights activist who has sought help for Shawangunk prisoners, said such cases show that authorities would prefer even assisted suicide to helping improve prison conditions.

Shawangunk sinks have push-button faucets difficult to operate from a wheelchair. Easton Beckford, a former Shawangunk prisoner, said in an affidavit that he has to collect water by using a makeshift stopper and then lifting it in his hands to his body, causing some to spill on the floor.

Several times he has been given a “deprivation order” for spilling water, which means “they turn the cell water on for only 15 minutes each day,” he said. “That is my only opportunity to drink water, brush my teeth, clean myself and flush the toilet.”