The Chicago Tribune spoke with ACLU of Illinois associate legal director Ben Wolf about the recently released study examining the state of health care for prisoners detained in Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) facilities. The report, issued by a panel of court-appointed experts, highlights that the majority of inmates' deaths result from "significant lapses in care" on the part of IDOC medical staff. The report is a result of a lawsuit that the ACLU of Illinois joined in 2013 to challenge the dysfunctional, mismanaged system that fails to adequately serve the nearly 50,000 IDOC prisoners. Wolf told the Tribune:
"This report confirms that people incarcerated in Illinois state prisons receive grossly inadequate medical care that endangers their lives and in some cases leads to their deaths," said Benjamin Wolf, the associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which joined the suit after it was filed by the Uptown People's Law Center and the Seyfarth Shaw law firm. "From start to finish, the system is broken."
