From The Outline:
A week after Richard Mosley arrived as an inmate at Pennsylvania’s maximum-security SCI Fayette prison in 2008, he started getting sick. The air outside was so contaminated that his nose kept closing up. Then came the weight loss, followed by the gastrointestinal problems. Pretty soon, Mosley was relying on asthma masks to breathe. “I was going back and forth to medical trying to get some kind of relief or diagnosis,” he told The Outline. “I think I went maybe 35, 40 times.”
Mosley, a Philadelphia native and self-described “health nut,” wasn’t used to falling ill. Before coming to SCI Fayette, he rarely even caught colds. But he says all of the doctors he saw at SCI Fayette insisted that his health problems weren’t real. “They kept telling me, ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s psychosomatic. You’re imagining it.’” At one point, he says a doctor blamed his failing health on allergies.
Meanwhile, Mosley started writing letters to local officials three days per week. “I was making a big stink,” he said. “If I was going to die there, I wasn’t going to die quietly.” He knew something was wrong. All around him, inmates were suffering. Skin rashes, gastrointestinal problems, and breathing issues were common across the prison. Everyone had a runny nose. The water quality was so abhorrent that guards brought bottled water for their onsite patrol dogs, according to Mosley. But the inmates still had to drink from the tap.
Only after he completed his sentence in 2012 and received a phone call from the Pennsylvania-based advocacy group Abolitionist Law Center did Mosley finally learn what was making him sick. Continue reading >>>
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