“State’s attorney finds no individual at fault.”  That was the headline in today’s St. Albans Messenger.

It’s  a sad little story, that of 23-year old Ashley Ellis who went to jail for “careless and negligent operation of a motor vehicle” and died two days later when she herself was carelessly and negligently denied medication for a known health condition; and apparently no one is to blame, at least not in the narrow legal sense.  What that says about the way we deal with sick and troubled people in this country speaks volumes.  There are, we are told, a higher percentage of people in jail in this country than in any other country on the globe, with an average of 701 people out of every 10,000 individuals, currently imprisoned.  The lion’s share of these incarcerations apparently represent drug-related crimes of possession and petty trafficking; people who might be better and more economically dealt with through effective intervention and rehabilitation programs.  But we have allowed a selective puritanism and Byzantine sense of justice to morph into the dog-wagging tail that is our twenty-first century penal system.  Inevitably, jailing people has become big business, too;  really, REALLY  big business with contractors, subcontractors and a netherworld economy  as much dependent on a steady stream of “customers” as IBM or AT&T.  

I don’t know any of the details about Ashley Ellis’ short life of “crime.”  This little girl probably should have been deprived of her driver’s license long ago, both for her own and other people’s safety.  She certainly needed a lot more intervention than just potassium tablets could provide; but that was the very least that the Northwest State Correctional Facility health service contractors should have done for her; and for neglecting that responsibility, they most certainly should be held accountable.

In light of recent efforts on the federal level to have the privilege of “person-hood” bestowed upon corporations, I found  advocate Barry Kade’s comment that he doesn’t “know how you would go about charging a corporation with criminal negligence” to be food for thought.  The parties seeking to assert person-hood for corporations are doing so in order to secure first amendment rights for corporations so that they might have broader  influence on elections. Even the ACLU is reluctantly admitting that this argument may have some merit.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if corporations won person-hood  only to be exposed to an endless barrage of criminal negligence cases on behalf of victims like Ashley Ellis whose lonely health struggle just got lost in the disinterested shuffle of corporate efficiencies?