Roger is an older man, perhaps 65 years old, who had been wounded in the first U.S. Iraq war.  He had been shot in the head in a gun battle and had traumatic brain injury, and he was considered a heroic figure for getting his soldiers out of a really bad situation.

He came to our inpatient treatment facility as an inmate diverted from prison to get substance abuse treatment before his release.  A lanky, toothless man, he was typically good natured and willing to get silly to lighten the mood of the 50+ men housed in a tiny compound.

Roger had lost his daughter and his wife to leukemia and began using cocaine to cope with the loss, and he surrounded himself with cocaine users so he wouldn't be alone.  He had plenty of money and did not commit any crimes other than buying and using drugs.

He himself had been abandoned by his mother and father very early in life and grew up in foster care or on the streets.  He was attached to his wife and family, as you can imagine, but he didn't trust himself to keep his temper in check with them.  He would leave and go for a long, long walk if he ever got angry enough to consider hitting anyone, and as his daughter was growing up and getting rebellious, that happened more and more often.  But Roger himself never ever hit his family members.  He had been badly beaten by many, many people while he was growing up, and he was damned if he was going to do to his wife and daughter what had been done to him.

Roger had a slurring problem as a result of the head injury, so he always sounded a bit drunk, and as we sat together that day and discussed his daughter, he wasn't slurring and he wasn't kidding around.  He looked at me with glassy eyes and said, "I swore I would never do anything to harm her.  I never did."

 Roger also has serious heart problems.  The parole agent assigned to the facility, a Limbaugh Dittohead who was trying to make me as unhappy as possible so I'd leave, went to get refills on this man's medications but came back without the critical heart medication.  My client began to show symptoms of congestive heart failure, so I asked the agent to take him to the prison hospital so he could get the medication he needed.  I was really worried.  It took weeks to get the agent to take him, and because it was such a long drive to get there and back, the agent always tried to squirm out of it if he could.

Eventually he did take the client back to the prison for a medical assessment after his limbs had begun to swell, and when the agent returned without the client, he claimed Roger was in such bad condition that the prison hospital doctor had chosen to keep him in the hospital for close monitoring.  He would not be returning, but I was really happy that he had the care he needed.

Two weeks later, another of my clients was taken to the same prison for emergency dental work, and when he came back, he told me that the Roger was still there but in the general population.  He had not even been seen by a doctor at all, and that he was in very bad shape.  All of his other medications had been left behind when he went to the prison, and now he was taking nothing for his chronic conditions.  I asked the facility director about it, and he said, "There's nothing you can do about it.  It's out of your hands."

That wasn't the first incident between the parole agent and that particular client.  The man had arrived at our facility without his property, which typically consisted of a cardboard box full of paperwork, books, and sometimes some toiletry supplies and snacks.  Most arrived with no clothing whatsoever but the paper suits on their backs.  And underwear.  You can see right through those suits.

Roger had been taken by an old friend who forged a power of attorney and raided his bank account, and all of his paperwork on the account, the fraudulent legal document, and his police contact paperwork was in his box, which sat in the prison.  There was a previous incident where a man arrived without his property, and I had called the prison to ask them to find it and send it with the next batch of inmates.  It arrived that day, but I got an earful from the agent via the facility director; this was not my responsibility, and I was stepping on the agent's toes.

The typical way prison complaints work there is that the client must ask the agent for the specialized form and file that form so the complaint could be investigated.  That raises all kinds of problems when the agent punishes everyone for expressing a desire or need.  In prisons, those forms are available all over the place, and anyone can get one and file it.  But the agent told Roger to file the form, and he did it.  The CDC is required to respond to complaints within a fairly short period of time, but Roger waited and waited to hear something and never did.  Roger regularly asked the agent about the complaint, and each time he did, the agent would get hotter.