Hospitals and prisons. An action plan for the liberation of our patients

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.