Source: Hari Sucahyo / Getty
We already know based on numerous stories that we’ve reported in the past that modern prisons are essentially death camps where if guards aren’t physically assaulting inmates, then they are simply leaving them to rot and die in their disease-ridden cells. That said, this story takes the level of evil to a whole ‘nother level.
62-year-old Susie Balfour was an inmate at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility until December 2021. According to a report from The Guardian, in November of that year, the Mississippi Department of Corrections finally allowed her to have a biopsy despite being fully aware of her cancer since May 2018. They let her sit with untreated, unsupervised, unrelenting cancer for more than three years. By the time she was able to see a doctor in January 2022, she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes, thoracic spine, bones, and liver.
Devils.
Balfour has filed a lawsuit against MDOC and her lawyers say that her case is far from an anomaly. They claim they know at least 15 other women at CMCF who also have cancer and are not being treated.
“I want to hold them accountable for what they’ve done to me,” Balfour said in an interview last week from her home in Memphis. “Being alone in there, I feared I was going to die, because I’ve seen so many others dying from not being able to get the proper care they needed.”
Ms. Balfour’s story lies at the intersection of both Black women’s issues with the medical system in America and the conditions under which inmates are held in this society where private prisons are money-making business ventures.
“They always think everybody is faking. How can you tell me something that is going on inside of my body is not happening?”
“It’s an evil world we live in”, an Atlanta rapper once said, and told no lie. We hope that Ms. Balfour’s remaining days can be joyous and pain-free. We also hope that the incarcerated women who are being left for dead in prison cells get both medical help and civil restitution for the heinous neglect that they are suffering.
