Inspired To Heal
Stories of clinicians, educators, innovators, and researchers who built or led programs of excellence in government health institutions. Each guest has excelled in clinical medicine, program building, or public health. They persevered and succeeded through a clear vision, collaboration, and a passion for the mission of government-run health systems. Their stories will inspire those seeking change in their own organizations.
Inspired To Heal
Cook County Jail: Public Health, & Prevention (Part 2)
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Dr. Jack Raba is recruited back to Cook County Hospital to be the medical director for Cook County Jail where he spearheads the transformation of healthcare at the jail, and champions public health initiatives to combat tuberculosis, smoking, and sexually transmitted infections. He also addresses civil rights by courageously confronting the use of excessive force within the jail and pre-arrival by Chicago Police Department under the leadership of Commander Jon Burge.
Epilogue provided by Doctors Jane Leonardson and Connie Mennella, two Northwestern Medical Students who made correctional healthcare a career after hearing Dr. Raba’s guest lecture.
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Welcome to Inspired to Heal, where I interview innovators, educators, clinicians, and leaders in government-run health institutions. Season one focuses on former staff at Cook County Hospital, Chicago's SafetyNet Health System. I'm Bill Trick, your host for Inspired to Heal. In part one of the Jack Raba interview series, we heard about Dr. Raba's early life through his year as a physician in Alaska and Guatemala. He's about to return to Cook County to become the medical director at Cook County Jail.
SPEAKER_02So anyway, I came back, Jorge Prieto is the chairman of medicine. He calls me and asks me to come back, seeing patients and supervising residents. The house staff had stopped doing rotations at Cook County Jail, the county and the hospital administration, which was now responsible for the health care at the jail. They had hired a number of private groups to find any docs possible to cover the jail. They had pediatricians covering the female unit, an obstetrician who was working a male unit, and nobody had primary care, except for a little bit of the pediatrician, but not for adults. They had a staggering spike in lawsuits, and the county was paying off maybe five to six times as much for the lawsuits that they were facing for health care. Mike Stalker was assistant head of family medicine, and he and I wrote the Stocker report for the executive medical staff covering all these deficits in care that were happening at the jail. Assistant to George Dunn asked me to take the job. I said no. I said it's not doable with the staff you have and the budget you have. It's just not doable and turned it down three times. And Ron Shansky or Bert King were still there. Bert called me up. He said, Don't say no. Write down what you need and see if they'll take it. Then you've got a negotiable, you could get something. So I asked for doubling the budget, and we had to make SERMAC at Kirk County Jail, the a department at Kirk County Hospital. Every doc that we would hire would have to go through credentialing, so you would never have a situation where unqualified docs were doing primary care at the jail. We asked for an ambulances. I just covered the ground for what I thought would help the jail provide care in a reasonable way that was at least had the basic standards of care that are in the community. George Dunn reluctantly allowed me to be hired. He even said this. He was very reluctant to have an ex-con be the medical director at Cook County Jail, which I took as kind of a point of honor. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03And possibly one of the uh important characteristics of someone who would be sympathetic to the population.
SPEAKER_02It certainly didn't make me afraid of the population. I think the first step for new docs, nurses, and physician assistants is that you come in knowing that this is not an unsafe environment. There are aspects of lack of safety that you have to be aware of. But as a rule, it is not unsafe. It's also a great unmet need. If you just got to work there for a month and you're going, people are coming in with unattended problems, either by their own doing or their substance abuse, or more likely their access to care in the community. So it really made you feel that it was important. You can tell your wife that I thought during the years I was the active medical director at Cook County GL, that it was the most important public health site in the city of Chicago. The amount of public health work that was done there with county staff was staggering. Screening for STDs, screening for tuberculosis, vaccination, identification and treatment of HIV at a time when people weren't accessing it the way they should, nor were we making it that available to patients in that population. I didn't fire them, but the assistant from George Dunn essentially fired all the docs over a weekend. I had 48 hours to hire docs to cover Cook County Jail. We were able to get docs who owed National Health Service Corps among a number of things I thought were important. It was bringing in good docs because as a rule, good people recruit good people for you. We hired some really wonderful docs, many of whom ended up being national experts for correctional health care. I thought we had better internists than the internal medicine department at one point. That would be debatable. I think that made a huge difference in recruitment and retention of docs.
SPEAKER_03One of the unique aspects that you mentioned is that the jail health system was part of the Cook County Health System as a whole. And from what I've heard from possibly you and others is that that's an advantage to the kind of care that's received by the detainees at Cook County Jail.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell You're absolutely right on the money, and maybe you heard it from others, but not long before it would be in the late 60s, early 70s before Cook County got involved. There were scandals then of lack of care and other issues, but it was under the sheriff at that point. It was not part of Cook County Hospital. Dr. Prieto and Dr. Young were actually told by the executive director of the county health system, Dr. Jim Houghton, said, You've got to take on the jail. I think that order came from George Dunn, and I think that the politics of it was that the Cook County Board did not like Dr. Houghton, and they thought that nobody could manage Cook County Jails healthcare, and it would be a nightmare, and they would have a reason for firing Jim Houghton. And Dr. Houghton directed Quentin, didn't give much choice to figure out a way to send residents there. And Quentin wasn't sure either, and he sent Ron Shansky, a third-year resident, to spend a month there and come back and say, is there training capabilities for residents? You can't just send someone to service. You've got to be part of a training program if you want to maintain a residency program. Braun said, Yeah, there's places for training here. And that's when Quentin started the mandatory rotation and was in 74 and it went through 78. And at some point we had to take over the jail when the residents were no longer allowed there. And I think that linkage with County Hospital is invaluable. In fact, we were the first jail in the country to have the same electronic record as the hospital system that you were linked to. Everything we did at the jail, a resident or a attending could look up at Cook County Hospital's electronic record. Everything that you did at the hospital was available to us. Avoidance of duplication, better access to care, look up specialty notes that you hadn't got a paper copy on. It really made a difference at the jail. And it helped a lot when patients got admitted to Cook County Hospital.
SPEAKER_03Trevor Burrus, Jr. The value of that can't be overstated, the uh integration of the electronic health record across the jail, the clinics, and the hospital. You mentioned earlier that you had a public health approach that was informed by your work internationally. Was there any program or public health intervention that you played a role in that you're particularly proud of?
SPEAKER_02I think all of us at the jail were very proud of this. The fact that we for a long time screened all men and women for gonorrhea and chlamydia and identified that 30% of the men under 30 who came in had gonorrhea or chlamydia. And the women, by the way, had higher rates, but there were a lot fewer admissions. And that probably was related to some women who worked the streets that probably uh increased their rate of chlamydia and gonorrhea. The public health department stated that for every patient that we identified with an STD and treated before they left Cook County jail, that you prevented 10 cases that year in the city of Chicago or in the county of Cook. They strongly said that this was an unmissed opportunity, that if we can keep this going, it really makes an impact on the city itself and the communities of origin for patients. We also started chest x-ray screening for tuberculosis. Only one place was doing that. LA was doing it, but not as well as we did. We had a wonderful radiology chief named Gene Leto, and he got a low-dose chest x-ray that would pick up active TB. And our public health friends stated to us that it's because of that screening of everyone during the early years of the HIV epidemic why there wasn't the same outbreak of tuberculosis in the Chicago area that was seen in New York and Houston and Miami and other places where HIV hit them hard. HIV hit Chicago hard, but it didn't change much our TB rates. They put a lot of credit into just doing that at the jail. You would identify someone, they'd be immediately in isolation, waiting for further microbiological studies. I think it made a major difference. The other thing that we did during our time was stop tobacco at Cook County Jail. It had been tried for years, they couldn't get it done, other good people had tried to do it. We were able to gather data, and I think that makes a real difference. We were able to say that there were 70 fires at Cook County Jail in the 2003 to 2005, and that a thousand men and women had been exposed to smoke inhalation, that a number of people had to be brought to our own local urgent care for asthma attacks because of smoke exposure to the fires set by matches that were allowed in because of tobacco, and that a hundred officers and detainees had been sent to outside emergency rooms because of smoke inhalation. We had such strong data, and nobody would make the decision on the correctional side. We were able to get an appointment with Sheriff Mike Sheehan. His kid brother went to school a year ahead of me. Sheriff Sheehan, as a hobby, was a football referee at Notre Dame Stadium. So I knew all these things. And so Sergio Rodriguez was medical director. He and I went down there. We had a half an hour meeting. His secretary calls us in. I say, I know your brother Tiny. We chatted and I mentioned something about Notre Dame. And next thing you know, 25 minutes of stories about him being a referee at Notre Dame. And his secretary pops her head in and says, Sheriff Sheehan, your next appointment's here. And he says, Why are you guys here? We give him our three-minute elevator story, these many fires, this much money, these many admissions of your staff and your detainees to local hospitals for smoke inhalation. The cost to asthma medicine was staggering. A lot of it we thought was smoke related, and your staff was smoking everywhere if the inmates weren't. And he says, good idea. We'll do it. I could three minutes. And honestly, and he did it. I mean, to this day, I you know, all that was just to talk to him, and he he listened to what Dr. Rodriguez and I said. Three minutes we were out of there, and I'll be darned if not a few months later in August of 2005, smoking was banned at the jail. It helped that the union rep of the officers was an asthmatic who hated the smoke. So we didn't get a union pushback, and it was eliminated. And our pharmacy said that the saving an asthma spray was staggering. Obviously, we pushed vaccines for those who were of age and did what we could do with that.
SPEAKER_03I'm sure during that 25-minute story about refereeing at Notre Dame, you were probably thinking, can we get to the important topic? But it probably turned out to be listening to him was was as influential as what you said.
SPEAKER_02I think it was. I think he kind of sensed that we weren't rabble rousers. If anything security wants, is they want to make the decision and they want to make it theirs. And maybe the fact that both Sergeant and I were Southside kids, I don't know what it was, but anyway, maybe knowing his brother Tiny was helpful too.
SPEAKER_03Jack, if you're willing to talk about it, is the police brutality that you witnessed as a physician at the jail and what you did about it to try to prevent that from happening.
SPEAKER_02Well there is a one single incident that focused a lot of our attention on that. We had already, as a system among the medical team, have been trying to identify any type of injuries that could have been due to excessive use of force within the jail. We had learned that if an officer came over with a boxer fracture of his fifth metacarpal, we knew somebody was going to come over later, and sure enough, an hour later, an inmate would be brought over with a fractured nose or a broken jaw. We started reporting that and we felt that that had an immediate impact on officers because they're in trouble if they're shown to use excessive force when it's not necessary. We thought that made a difference. Then we found that some of the officers were slapping men right over their ear and rupturing their eardrums, and because it gave no external sign. We tried to figure out ways that there weren't injuries being caused by the correctional staff against detainees that were avoidable. We even learned to send a doc over or a PA or a nurse. If there was a riot and the riot was under control or a fight broke out, maybe not a riot, we didn't even have to go inside the tier. But if we were right there at the door, nobody got hurt. And I really mean none of the detainees were hurt after everything had settled down. No one walked in there and slapped them and punched them and were angry, especially if somebody had spit in an officer or hit an officer. We were thinking about injuries then, about what we could prevent and what we couldn't. Anyway, I got it was the weekend, it's in February around 1982. I'd been at the jail about a year and a half-ish. I got a call from a young doc who eventually became an infectious disease doc out in San Francisco. His name is Dr. Steve Goodman, not related to the singer. And he was covering the emergency room. I think he was moonlighting then. He might have been a third-year resident. He called me at home on actually on one of those old walkie-talkies that were our pagers. And he said, This guy has injuries. I'm not sure what to make of him. I finally think I said to Steve, Would you like me to come in? He said, That would be great. And so I came in. Steve was already, his shift had changed, but he had left his notes. I grabbed our chief paramedic. We got a flashlight and we headed over to Division I, the big, huge old county jail part of it. We went in, had to get a couple other officers to join us because we were walking into a tier. And I just walked in and there was this gentleman there named Andrew Wilson, and he and his brother had been arrested, and there'd been a major manhunt for the previous week throughout the entire South Side, maybe with a huge amount of violations of how they had broke into people's homes, you know, bashed down doors to try to find these two brothers who had killed two young Chicago policemen. Andrew had been arrested and was now being admitted to the jail after having spent some time in a police lockup. And when I I I asked him if I could talk to him, it was kind of a dimly lit area, but we had a flashlight. He had multiple bruises on his head. He had a cut by his eye, his eye was battered on his right side. He had a gash on the back of his head. He had lots of head and neck blunt trauma. And then I asked him, because I had read Steve's note and he clued me in what to look for, and I asked him if he would take off his shirt, and I looked at it, and there were linear blisters, not quite parallel, but but lengthy. Not very wide, maybe a quarter of an inch and long. I asked him if he had any other injuries, and he said yes on my leg. And I knew that from Steve, but I was letting Mr. Wilson direct the exam. He had a huge blistering lesion on his thigh. Huge. The blister must have been an inch across, and it went for maybe I don't know, maybe eight inches. I said who did this to you? And he said, The police. And then I said, How did this happen? He said, I was cuffed to a radiator, an old iron radiator, and I was pushed against it repeatedly while I was cuffed to the radiator. I asked him, is that any other injuries? And and he said, Yes, I was electroshocked to my gums, lips, and genitals. The blisters were obvious and they were as consistent with his story that he was pushed against the radiator. He was not histrionic. He was actually truly very cooperative, very calm talking to me. I didn't get the feeling that he was going to be trying to exaggerate what was real. I thanked him and I went back the next day to make sure that nothing else had happened to him overnight, and nothing did, and he said, No, people have left me alone and my wounds have been changed. Very a reasonable discussion for a guy who's facing major charges. I went back to my office and I wrote a note to the superintendent of the Chicago police, Richard Briesick, discussing what I saw. It was um you know, I I I think I could almost let me try to read a little bit of it when I I just I just mentioned that he he had multiple bruises, swellings, and abrasion on his face and head. His right eye was battered and he had a superficial laceration. He had several linear blisters on his right thigh, right cheek, and anterior chest, which were consistent with radiator burns. He stated that he'd been cuffed to a radiator and pushed against it. He also stated that electroshocks had been administered to his gums, lips, and genitals. I later learned that he had also alligator clip marks on his ears, and he then said, Oh yes, they also electroshocked my ears. They take like a little clamp and attach it to a wire, and I mentioned that all these injuries had occurred prior to his arrival at the jail, and there must be a thorough investigation of this alleged brutality. I not only sent it to the superintendent of police, but the lead administrator under George Dunn, the president of the county board, Lynn Bersky, who was a medical administrator at the jail, really solid, solid guy. Sheriff Richard Elrod and Phil Hardeman, who was the executive of the jail at that point. I I never heard back from anyone. Never heard from the police, never heard if an investigation was done. Ever. And and I I learned to say something, and thank you for you said it. I um I thought it was alleged brutality. I thought this was police that reacted to two of their own being killed. I thought this was going to be a a crime of passion that they should never have done, obviously, and it was brutal. And it didn't dawn on me until a lot more information came out that this was torture being done to men by a certain group of policemen led by Captain John Burge, who extracted involuntary confessions to crimes they may or may not have committed. This letter with a there's even a typo in it, Bill, of all things that nobody ever embarrasses me about, pointed it out. But but it became the smoking gun that had objective, unbiased documentation that these unusual injuries had been caused by Chicago police. It turns out there was an old iron-ribbed radiator in the basement of that police lockup. This use of torture and was I think it was modified based on this letter by Burge. It didn't stop for seven or eight more years because nobody really investigated it. And thank God for the People's Law Office and an author named John Conroy or Vote for the Reader who raised this over and over again. And Flint, these two lawyers, just were persistent that something is not being done here. Why is it not being done? Why aren't we investigating it? I eventually testified at over seven trials for Burge or his associates. The only one that he was, Captain Burge, was sentenced about was the last one when he was convicted of not understanding. of these crimes, but of perjury. He eventually spent four years in jail. I I think there's something we learned. We really believed that if we wrote a letter like this and or if I wrote a letter like this, that there would be a reasonable investigation done by authorities in power. I just think it would have been copying the people we copied, that that would have been done. That did not happen. I I I consciously did not want to investigate it because we've got detectives who do you know investigations. They do it thoroughly, they document it, they get witnesses. That didn't happen. It just didn't happen and that's why Burge continued to do what he did and his team continued to be involved in it. It's a why that I think the final number was something like 180 some people had their death sentences commuted by either Covernor Ryan or Cover Quinn. And the county has paid Bill I don't know the right number but I know the last time that I was aware of it it was over $130 million in settlements to the people who had been tortured by the Chicago police. These aren't people who have been injured for excessive force we're talking tortured to get a confession. Some of my police friends weren't happy with me but very quickly they realized that all the good work done by good policemen to investigate and to document their findings were thrown out the window by a small group of police who did this illegally and throughout all the evidence that any other reasonable police had gathered. George Dunn was always nice to me at the budget hearings when I'd go down there, but the only time he ever called me ever called me face to face was a week or two after I wrote this letter and he said Doc, why are you getting involved in this? Why did you write that letter? And I said nicely to him that our goal is to prevent injuries whether inside the jail or outside the jail that could have been avoided and I said for your own benefit this proved that it wasn't your correctional officers, the county officers who did this injuries it was done outside prior to coming in the jail so you should be thanking us for what we do. He hung up on me and we never talked about it again. I didn't think I was being intimidated until I went home and Susie was pregnant with our first child. She said I I think you're going to get fired. It hadn't dawned on me that there might be something a repercussion like that. It never happened and I never really got any open heat that I'm aware of from anyone nor did it impede anything in whatever I've done at Cook County Hospital and other places. The final trial I had told the federal attorney the U.S. Attorney's office was managing that final case they had asked me did anybody ever call you or intervene with you? And now no lawyer had ever asked me that question and if anything I've learned about lawsuits is you answer the questions your lawyer asks you don't offer anything. Both sides so the attorney for Burge said why are you bringing this up now after seven trials? And they had all my depositions in the past of course I said because no one lawyer asked me until this day if that had ever happened and that's why I did testify that George Dunn had called me. So I didn't get fired, Bill. And Susie was relieved. She still thought I was going to get fired though. She said it's going to come around to haunt you. It's a great lesson that if you see a problem you got to try to stop it. You've got to at least report it. Maybe we should have done more. Maybe we should have investigated when we knew we weren't getting any feedback. Nobody was being interviewed about what happened. I think maybe if we would have been a little bit angrier we could have made a difference. I I I wonder about that at times. We we we expected good people to do their work the way they should and it just didn't happen. So that's a little regret I have for allowing Burge to keep doing and his team and others to do what they were doing. And took a long time to stop what he was doing.
SPEAKER_03You've had an incredible journey at Cook County Health and I'm happy that many years ago you didn't take the advice of your dean in medical school and that you decided to ruin your life with a career at Cook County.
SPEAKER_02Thanks. It's um I have no regrets in my life I would I think you had asked one question.
SPEAKER_03I have a question that I would ask August and I also can't let you go without commenting it sounds like you were quite the golfer but I understand you were quite the basketball player as well. If it hadn't been for coming in second place, I think it was the Gibbs McKenna invitational tournament that if you had placed first you might have had a basketball career.
SPEAKER_02That's very possible. So I can tell you one basketball story quickly that had to do with correctional health. I was appointed the medical monitor of prisons of Puerto Rico. The first time I went there there they had a large jail called the White Bear Osoblanco. It was so dangerous and so run by gangs that the correctional staff did not go inside the jail. They would have a megaphone and they'd say Bill Trick, you're dude for court, come down and Bill would yell not today, I'm not coming and it didn't have to go. And people were known to disappear there. They were some evidence that they were somebody who didn't follow the gang rules within there were actually chopped up in flushed down toilets. I was escorted to the entrance of this big ols Blanco which again had these massive iron doors and the officers open them up and they are all dressed in black. They've all got machine guns and they walk me up to the door and I walk in and they shut the door behind me and they stay outside. And I walk out to this courtyard thinking you've got to figure out a way to get up to talk to people to ask them their access to care, where they're getting their meds, usual stuff that you try to get a feel for the healthcare system. It's a really hot day and there's nobody out in the courtyard and there's a basketball court there. I've got a tie-on and a legal pad but I pick up the ball and I dribble it four or five times and I make this nice little smooth layup and all these guys watching me applauded. It was the high point of my basketball career anyway I walked up and I started to interview people and I always had to get permission from the gang leader on that tier. But that was the entrance to my my time at Puerto Rico. It must be quite a layup that you've got Jack I don't know about that. I you know you always start telling better stories about yourself and I I think you want to rematch in the term got the last question Jack.
SPEAKER_03Oh we didn't that's right I apologize. Yeah so if you could choose one item to put in your doctor's bag literal or figurative what would it be?
SPEAKER_02I would focus now about the judicial system and it's amazing to me that after many of us at Cook County Jail have advocated verbally not so politically as we should have but every forum we ever spoke at we talked about two things. I got the lecture to high school kids and I get the lecture to lots of people who want to know about the jail the cash bond was so evident that every time I spoke I would tell a story and two docs who became two stars in correctional health Jane Leonardson at and Connie Minella from a Northwestern when I lectured they both came to Cook County Jail because they had to pick where they had their National Service Corps place to go and they kind of remembered me and I seemed benign enough and funny enough that they thought maybe he'd be easy to work for for the three years they own Connie stayed forever. But I'd tell the story I'd have a male stand up and a female and I'm saying you both are at a bar. Somebody insults you andor aggressively hits you or does something and you hit him back and it gets to be a big scuffle and both of you get arrested. You're accused to be the provocateur and you go to the police lockup let's say it's Jane I said Jane you're rich. It's a $300 $500 bond. Your family will come up with it or you could come up with it right away and you go back to med school nobody really knows about it. Six weeks later you go to court and the charges are dropped and nothing changed in your life you paid your rent you did all the things you had to do you didn't miss school or work. Then I go Connie which it wasn't Connie was always a guy I'd pick on for this one I'd say and Connie you're broke. Your family can't support you in any way you don't have any savings you've got to come up with $500 but you can't you're put into jail your trial is it's a pretty quick one it should be a week later it gets postponed. Something happens it gets postponed again. Finally six weeks later trial comes up you're not guilty your charges are dropped you're released except you now have to repeat a whole semester at med school you didn't pay your husband or wife alimony that you had due. You didn't pay rent and you were kicked out and you were both equally guilty or equally innocent but only the person who couldn't come up with a cash bond spent time in jail and their life was dramatically impacted by that. I think they they got that since the early 80s we've been yelling about this these guys who are here who really aren't violent why are they here? We could give them better care than they were getting the community but why were they here? And we thought that as much as 25% of the population the jail could easily be released in our medical eyes either they were too frail too old too benign the charge was so small it just didn't work. The other thing that I would get in trouble if I lectured at a Catholic high school even back in the early 80s we said you've got to decriminalize substance abuse. We cannot put people in jail just for using drugs. We can't do that anymore. The money you save by not incarcerating member it costs 45,000 or 35,000 then a year to house someone at Cook County jail. If you save that money or use that space as a rehab unit or a mental health unit, this world might be a better place and we were trying to tell that story but we weren't organized enough. So the two things I would have said that we would have changed were those two things decriminalize substance abuse, eliminate cash bond and we're close to doing that at least in the state of Illinois. I would have been very proud if that had happened.
SPEAKER_03Those were two very ambitious items to put into a medical bag you clearly have a lot to be proud of for your service and dedication to the patients at Cook County Jail. And for the legacy that was carried on by Connie Manella and others who you trained.
SPEAKER_02I am to this day extremely proud that fourteen physicians who worked at CERMAC became medical directors or directors at 18 correctional centers in the United States. CERMAC is now nationally known to this day as a training ground for correctional health experts it's kind of called the cradle of correctional health leaders because of what Quentin and Jorge Prieto did, who allowed their residents to go and work there didn't fight Dr. Houghton about, thought it was a needy population Quentin Young said to me once when he was talking about his book looking at what I was able to do in my career or accomplished more wholly was the impact on correctional health. He said all these leaders Burt King, Ron Chansky, myself, Art Brewer that wouldn't have rotated through the jail except he made that happen for that four years, those accomplishments were done by a whole team of really good people at Cook County Jail.
SPEAKER_03It's really impressive I really appreciate you taking the time to to talk to me about this and being able to record it.
SPEAKER_02No it's a pleasure well thanks you actually forced me to sit down and think it's a pleasure to talk about it with you and your questions you know well placed and you were such a good listener it makes it easy to talk to you Bill.
SPEAKER_03I spoke with the two students who listened to Dr. Raba's lecture at Northwestern Medical School. They both ended up spending their careers in correctional health. First we'll hear from Dr. Leonardson and then Dr.
SPEAKER_05Connie Manella he was a lecturer for a lunch and learn series and and I'll tell you at Northwestern I didn't know anything about the care that people who are incarcerated received. In incarceration settings you see people who largely did not have access to healthcare prior to get getting there. And so you see pathology that is just extreme. Jack was just a huge part of bringing me there and inspiring me to continue in corrections. People are presumed innocent in the jails and we need to keep that in mind not that it should even matter if they're innocent or guilty for being deserving of healthcare. Jack mentioned that maybe you ended up at Cook County jail because he was funny enough or benign enough to work with he had a great presentation and he was clearly a humble guy who knew a lot I thought about it all those years later that oh I'd love to go work with that guy. I'm really thankful I ended up in this and that Jack was as inspiring as he was that was Jane Leonardson and now we'll hear from Connie Manella.
SPEAKER_04I'm a second year med student at Northwestern I never saw the class more attentive. He brought to life an aspect of medicine we didn't even know of and it was correctional medicine. He led by example he went to the tiers he showed us and demonstrated how important it was to be the advocate for our patients. We never called them inmates they were our patients. You're their Nexic kid you're their confidant you're their sometimes social worker and and they're protective because they are in this setting that can be dangerous. Even when he was not physically working in the jail he was working for the jail. It's almost mythical for us if we actually tried to gand off from the race and then when he needed him he came back for the little people thought he was gone beyond words what he did for justice and his incredible journey with the Burge case. If only someone had listened to Jack could we have changed criminal justice and police methods if they had only listened to Jack.
SPEAKER_03He was willing to go to jail to fight for the vulnerable do you know anyone else who escaped from jail or just Jack? Just Jack escaped and returned and his own volition is that's the case I'd like to thank today's guests Drs Raba, Leonardson and Manella for providing their insights into correctional health.
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