title: Hospitals and prisons. An action plan for the liberation of our patients.
abstract: Each day about 24,000 people are imprisoned in America's penal institutions. The experience for those people is humiliating, disturbing, and degrading. I know. I used to put them there. When I resigned from the United States District Attorney's office in 1975 after serving for three years as a federal prosecutor (and later as a night court judge) and started my new role as a hospital executive, I thought I was leaving the process of imprisonment behind. In the winter of 1975-76, as I went about the task of learning how hospitals functioned, I visited the emergency room. I visited the admitting area. I visited the floors. I watched doctors, nurses, and X-ray technologists at work. Gradually, a disturbing thought came to me: Hospital patients are treated much like convicted felons.
authors: U.S. Health Corporation, Columbus, OH.
authors: E
authors: E
authors: Chapman
mesh_terms: D015285:Hospital-Patient Relations; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010344:Patient Advocacy; D010934:Planning Techniques; D011330:Prisons; D014481:United States