When you are poor and have no access to healthcare, what do you do? A small portion of desperate people will consider going to prison for the help that they need. While the story below comes from 1912, it is a sad story that continues to happen today.
Innocent — Goes to Pen to Be Cured of Disease
Canon City, Colo., Feb. 2 — Albert Blunt, aged 23, confessed to a crime he did not commit, so he could break in the penitentiary and there get the proper treatment for tuberculosis which he could not get as a free man.
Blunt is behind the walls in the state penitentiary here serving a sentence for burglary. He says he confessed to the crime so he could get relief from Tom Tynan, the humane warden of the penitentiary.
That he is getting it is evident from the fact that since entering the penitentiary last May he has gained 15 pounds.
When Blunt entered the pen he was a mere skeleton. He had served two months in the county jail at Grand Junction and he was so wasted away and so weak, that he could not talk. He had given up all hopes of life. Then he heard of the reputation Warden Tynan had for humane treatment of convicts.
“I decided to take a chance and Im glad I did, for I may bear the stigma of an ex-convict for the rest of my life, but I would have been dead before this if I hadn’t pleaded guilty,” Blunt says. When I finish my sentence by May, 1913, I hope to be cured.”
Source: (1912, February 02). Innocent — Goes to Pen to Be Cured of Disease. The Day Book.
