A Federal Judge Compared the U.S. Prison System to a ‘Soviet Gulag’ Over Inmate Health Concerns

The Federal Bureau of Prisons denied a potentially vital doctor’s appointment to an imprisoned Florida woman with signs of breast cancer, drawing a sharp rebuke from a judge who noted that the Justice Department’s own inspector general recently investigated the prison system for delaying “urgent medical appointments, leading to the death by treatable cancer of an inmate.”

In his Tuesday order releasing the woman from home confinement on April 9, U.S. District Judge Roy Dalton Jr. compared the American prison system to the Soviet Union’s brutal gulags, noting that law enforcement agencies remain recalcitrant even in the face of court orders and official investigations.

“Nothing seems to move the nation’s federal prison system operators to improve their response to the urgent medical needs of the federal prison population,” Dalton wrote. “Court orders go unread or ignored. [Office of Inspector General] reports are dismissed, recommendations unheeded. Sanctions brook no change. Outside medical referrals are like Solzhenitsyn’s sick bay in the Soviet Gulag: a coveted but nearly inaccessible refuge for which only prisoners near death qualify for admission.”

The court battle involves Justina Maria Holland, who was serving an eight-year sentence in Orlando, Florida, for embezzling more than $1 million at her job, faking paperwork to rack up company credit card charges and raiding her employer’s bank accounts.

And while she repeatedly sought to reduce her time behind bars, her request to a judge in January was different: a doctor weeks earlier had concluded she was at high risk of breast cancer after discovering she was bleeding from her nipples and had lumps in both of her breasts. However, the urgent referral she got on Jan. 8 to see a breast surgeon was ignored by prison administrative staff, according to court records.

The DOJ opposed her release, with a government lawyer not identified in publicly available court records claiming that “there does not appear to be any documented emergency.” The prison eventually scheduled an appointment for Holland with a general surgeon, which her doctor pointed out was wholly inadequate in a note that stressed that it was “medically necessary and urgent” for Holland to specifically see a breast surgeon, records show.

But when the judge demanded to see Holland’s entire medical file, the DOJ didn’t turn over the doctor’s follow-up note specifying that Holland needed to see a surgeon who specializes in breast cancer.

“The medical file certified as complete was, in fact, not complete,” Dalton said in his ruling.

The judge gave the government 30 days to give Holland access to a proper surgeon, but prison staff waited weeks to schedule an appointment — again, with the wrong kind of surgeon, and two hours away from where she was incarcerated. When prison officials finally corrected the error, they’d waited so long that the earliest appointment with a breast surgeon was in April, two weeks after the judge’s deadline and three months since the emergency began.

“The Court is not happy about releasing Ms. Holland prematurely,” the judge wrote this week, ordering her sentence cut short. “She’s a convicted con artist. But a prison sentence should not include the added consequence of delayed diagnosis and treatment of cancer.”

The judge’s order was first spotted by Court Watch, a weekly newsletter of federal filings run by researcher Seamus Hughes.

This episode in Orlando comes just three months after the DOJ’s inspector general investigated a similar incident — at this judge’s request, no less — that resulted in a man’s death. The January report documented how Frederick Mervin Bardell, who was serving nearly 12 years behind bars for sharing child sexual abuse images, was denied medical care for months after he found blood in his stool while at a Texas prison.

“By the time Bardell arrived at his destination in Florida, his clothes were soiled with excrement and blood due to his illness and he had to be pushed off the plane in a wheelchair by a fellow passenger. He died 9 days later,” the report states, concluding that prison officials failed to take his condition seriously.

Federal judges have rebuked Trump administration officials and prosecutors for ignoring court orders: deporting immigrants who’d been ordered to stay, refusing to return people imprisoned abroad and blowing deadlines for evidence and responses in dozens of cases. But while those confrontations have chiefly involved the Department of Homeland Security, Dalton took aim this time at the Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department.

“There can be no presumption of regularity. The Bureau of Prisons will emerge unscathed, while the government’s lawyer — and most importantly, the inmate — will carry the scars of its misfeasance,” he wrote.