Retaliation For Speaking Out

*The following message was sent to Missouri Prison Reform from a current resident at Jefferson City Correctional Center*

Hello, On June 10th I sent you a email stating that I do not believe that the nurse’s staff at Jefferson City Correctional Center is the problem for the poor medical care at this institution, that in fact the problem is the executive and administration staff that work for the medical company Centurion is total at fault for the extremely poor medical care we as inmate’s inside this institution receive, as I stated in that email the biggest problem is you have a major staffing problem, you have less than 20 qualified nurse’s to cover and deal with the medical issue’s of close to 2000 inmate’s that are presently house at this institution. There is also a staffing issue with doctor’s, currently there is 1 full-time certified doctor, 1 full-time nurse practitioner (who is has already put in his notice to leave next month) and there is 1 part-time nurse practitioner who is here maybe once or twice a week. After that email was posted on your blog, I was recently fired from my job as the porter in the medical building at JCCC, I receive no prior notice or reason for my firing, all I was told by a COI was ” my services were no longer needed at medical and to get my stuff and go.” I have later come to learn that I was fired because as a porter one of my job’s was to stock the supply closet’s in medical, there is 2 main supply closet’s, one is located in TCU and the other in the main medical area know as (OPC), hen medical supplies arrived, it was my job to separate accordingly which closet these supplies were stored, the other closet was the biohazard room, were with a guard supervision I responsible for changing out old and storing new clean biohazard container’s, but I was fired because I knew the key number to these closet’s, not that I ever held a pair of key’s or that I opened one of the closet’s myself or without staff being present, just simply because I knew the key number to opened the closet that is sitting inside a maximum security prison. I believe that the real reason I was fired was because the administrator’s that was inside the medical building from Centurion on the day I was fired from my job, notified administration at this institution that they no longer wanted me working at medical here at Jefferson City Correctional Center and that is the real reason I was released from my job without a violation or a specific reason.

Submitted by,
Kevin Warren