What role does Oakwood play within the Ohio prison system?
… It meets the same standards as any civil mental hospital. And where a person is deemed by professional judgment, by doctors, to be, for want of a better way to describe this, virtually subject to civil commitment — if they’d been on the street, they would be seriously mentally ill and an imminent danger to themselves or others — then they will be sent to Oakwood for acute care. It’s not chronic care. It’s for acute episodes. It’s not chronic in the sense that the chronic care unit is for long-term care for an illness that’s not likely to go away very easily. So I don’t know the average number of days that are spent there, but it’s not very high. Ninety days would be a lot. It’s very expensive care. There’s very rich staffing. There’s 24-hour nursing. It is a hospital setting. Some of the inmates really like to go there. I know inmates who work very hard to look a lot sicker than they are to get to Oakwood, as they tell me off the record, for respite care: “I need to get out of th
