A murder suspect being held in the Benton County Jail in Arkansas is suing the county, claiming that his 105-pound weight loss is evidence that he and other inmates are "literally being starved to death."
Broderick Lloyd Laswell, accused of fatally beating and stabbing a man and then setting his home on fire, reports: "On several occasions I have started to do some exercising and my vision went blurry and I felt like I was going to pass out. About an hour after each meal my stomach starts to hurt and growl. I feel hungry again."
Jail officials claim that inmates receive about 3,000 calories' worth of food each day. I can believe that a 400-pounder could drop weight like a meth fiend on such a comparatively paltry regimen. You'd think he'd be pleased or at least neutral about the outcome if not the process, but then again he may not view the world and himself through the same lens others with more finely tuned faculties do.
I also believe him when he says he's hungry as often as he claims. Markedly overweight people seem to have an "appestat" permanently set on max. It's unfair to characterize them as weak-willed (or in more pejorative language) -- when I'm as hungry as they report so often being, I invariably eat, so I'm no less a glutton, hog, oinker, etc. than they are. In fact, I'm probably worse, given that I burn at least 1,000 calories a day and at times almost twice that amount in physical exercise. I happen to not incur the same consequences as people who wind up huge because I have a favorable metabolism and a pronounced exercise habit.
Stories like this do have a bearing on the claims of fundamentalist fat activists, who take the untenable position that food intake is essentially divorced from body habitus. Put any fat person who claims to eat fewer calories than he or she burns in prison, where food intake is obviously strictly controlled, and the weight will "magically" come off. Still, I'd recommend exercise and careful food journaling as a first line of attack and save the killing and arson for more refractory cases of obesity.
Medicine & Health
Comments
As someone who's struggled with obesity my whole life, I thank you for pointing out that "fat people" only eat when they're hungry. I wish sometimes that doctors would focus less on diet and exercise and more on appetite and lethargy. It's not normal to be hungry and tired all the time. And it does obese people no favors to dismiss serious symptoms that would be huge red flags in someone with a nominal BMI.
That said, I'd be curious to know this particular prisoner's A1C. The blurred vision, fatigue, and weakness sound like undiagnosed Type II diabetes.
Posted by: HP | April 28, 2008 12:20 AM
The weight loss that he had should vastly improve Type II diabetes.
Mr Laswell should get a visit from ex-gov Huckabee who would probably tell him to count his blessings :-\
Posted by: natural cynic | April 28, 2008 12:30 AM
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-arwdce/case_no-5:2008cv05094/case_id-30853/
Posted by: rpenner | April 28, 2008 12:43 AM
Maybe he Feels that his weight Loss will continue unchecked at a Rate of a half pound Per day until he is Gone, not unlike the Main chaacter in the Stephen king book Thinner which Involved a gypsy Curse. someone should Tell him that on a Regimen of 2,300 calories per Day he is bound to Stabilize at about 200 Pounds, maybe A little less.
I Suspect based on this man's command Of english plus the Rather unsophisticated Nature of his violent Crime that the system Failed him or Vice versa at some point Along the way And that loosing a lot Of weight is the Least of his concerns. meanwhile dozens Of men who weigh 400 Pounds and are stuck There And share everything in Common with mr. laswell Except his incarcerated Status are going out getting Gastric bypass Surgery when All they Really need is for the Food They Eat to Be locked Up
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 28, 2008 1:29 AM
It takes "finely tuned faculties" to look at a fat person and think "wow, that gross fattie should be happy to take the pounds off any way he can." Funny, because I thought that kind of simplistic bigotry was actually commonplace in our society.
Posted by: Stentor | April 28, 2008 2:27 AM
Nice strawman/distortion, stentor. I didn't label the inmate a "gross fattie" or claim that he should be pleased with the way he believes he's been treated by prison officials simply because he's leaner than he was eight months ago. And I specifically noted not only that the inmate might be expected to be displeased with the process leading to his weight loss, but that he might be ambivalent at best about the result.
With your penchant for seeing words that aren't there while ignoring those that are, along with your ho-hum misapplication of the word "bigotry," you'd make an excellent spokesperson for the FFA movement.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 28, 2008 2:42 AM
I'm with the fat guy here.
Most people would not be hungry on 3000 calories a day [as a fairly active 80kgs myself burning off around 1000 calories a day running I can do well on far less], but if this is an arbitrary limit then this person is evidently being treated differently from prisoners who can eat as many calories as they want. Maybe it's for his own good and all that, but that's not the issue here. Going hungry is fine if it's your choice, but as an unintended outcome of imprisonment it's not right at all, neither is it fair.
Posted by: Gav | April 28, 2008 5:00 PM
Perhaps "eating as much as you want" which is not a God-given freedom, nor freedom discussed in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution is not an actual right of prisoners. Perhaps it's a freedom and privilege, and one of those things you give up while incarcerated.
The plaintiff is not alleging that he is given less than other inmates or that inmates or staff are stealing from him or that staff are cheating the standard established by the "certified dietitian". He is alleging that he _needs_ more than the standard meal prescribed for inmates when all he can demonstrate is that he is losing weight and _wants_ more than other inmates. He also uses the first person plural, but we don't know what (if any) other inmates agree with him.
"[S]tarving to death" is not documented as literally true -- it is a curious type of death program which has failed to kill its sole target after 8 months. His complaints don’t seem to cover the first seven months of his jail time.
So it seems to me that there are four cases:
1) A battle of what experts say this particular inmate needs based on medical and legal expert testimony. As I am not an expert in these fields, my opinion doesn't matter, but I thought as long as he is not dropping muscle weight or eating his own organs or displaying medical signs of malnutrition, he doesn’t need to maintain his current weight.
2) A legal argument that fat people, in general, have a Federal right to stay fat even in circumstances when it is cheaper, more convenient, or not a serious concern to the state to have them slim down. Such a ruling would seem to apply not only to inmates but people in state-run hospitals and nursing homes, coma patients, food stamps, etc. I think that this "right" would be impractical in the extreme -- would fat people have to sign waivers of their "right to be fat" when embarking on even a casual diet lest they run the risk of being force-fed back to documented weight?? What if he caught tuberculosis -- would it be appropriate to force-feed the inmate if he’s too sick to eat what he needs to maintain his weight in the absence of a medical recommendation to do so??
3) A legal argument that being hungry, or claustrophobic or unhappy in prison is unfair and a violation of civil rights. All of these are conditions which can be treated with medication, so the argument goes they must be treated because otherwise jail might be unpleasant. This idea is nonsense.
4) A legal argument that being hungry is a different class of unhappiness. So that any reasonable medical treatment (I’m thinking brain surgery) would be OK to treat this unhappiness.
I am overweight -- have been for years -- but my life would be much easier if I had a waistline closer to what Sears thinks is the median for their Men’s department. Walking uphill to Boalt Law Library would be easier. I might even tolerate high temperatures better if I were slimmer. But as I make my own decisions, I think am responsible for my weight. If I were a parent of kids, I would not wish them to be fat. Likewise here, the plaintiff is not in control of his own life -- he is in jail -- so the only way he gets to be the decider is if fatness is an actual right and not just an opportunity.
Posted by: rpenner | April 28, 2008 7:26 PM
I agree with what you say. What I'm suggesting though is that there's a fifth case; that in being prevented from eating what he wants without consideration of his individual circumstances (which is what a blanket upper limit of 3000 calories might suggest) he's being treated differently from most other prisoners, and that's unfair. Whether this would be a legal argument in US law I've no way of saying.
Posted by: Gav | April 28, 2008 8:05 PM
If every inmate gets the same trays 3 times a day that add up to 2,300 calories, no one's being treated differently. The fact that this guy happened to come in a raging lard-ass who must have been eating more than twice what he's getting now doesn't mean shit. His stomach will adjust eventually, especially once he's convicted and has more to think about (he seems like one of those borderline retards who isn't quite sure why he's even locked up or how serious a pickle he is in).
Some inmates like to file lawsuit after lawsuit because they are bored and read lots of law books, I guess. This guy is different, he thinks he has a real grievance. He'll stop losing weight when he gets down to....well shit I don't know but obviously he will be in energy balance well before he reaches skin and bones stage.
Posted by: Ira Fews | April 28, 2008 8:12 PM
Gav, I think you have confused wants and needs.
What if he wants to eat truffled lobster every day, should he have a right to (economical prison grade) lobster because he wants to? No, of course not
A certain actor might not want to file tax paperwork and pay the taxes the law says he has to. Is that a good excuse for not paying taxes? No, of course not
You don't get special treatment under US Law because you want special treatment but because you are entitled to special treatment -- which for prisoners means you need special treatment. The government has no need to consider what you call his "individual circumstances" unless he makes a case that they need to. So a fixed diet can and must be presumed to be adequate for all unless the experts testify otherwise.
That's why the "Gay Marriage" thing is going to be settled by the courts, because either the argument that "male-female pairing is the only definition we used and to change the definition for a minority would be unlawful special treatment" or that "forcing people to pair with members of the opposite sex (for whatever that means nowadays) is a unlawful special burden on people attracted only to the same sex who are only trying to get the same state and federal privileges as the unburdened majority" will prevail. It's hard to see a middle ground here, other than to ignore it and hope it goes away. :)
But even if fat people, for whatever reason, needed to consume more food than normal, is that fair? What type of "identity" is "fat" when it can be changed? Historically it has been equated with "lazy" or "attitudes about food and exercise" which many fat people today would tend to agree with. But even if we treated the fatter people as a well-defined distinct population, is it fair that they claim more calories than the average person claims? (Insert comparison of U.S. Consumption relative to world averages here.) It might be considered fair if fat people, on the average, gave back more to the world than normal. (But I don't have a reference that saintliness or artistic talent or any form of genius outside of football and sumo was positively correlated with BMI.) More to the point, it is certainly true that not all fat people remind us of Santa Claus. Why, I hear that one such person is accused of beating and stabbing a man to death and burning down a house. That's hardly the behavior the world rewards with a cookie.
Posted by: rpenner | April 29, 2008 2:55 AM
Ain't it kinda ironic how they force-feed these same convicts when they go on hunger strikes.
Posted by: Bill from Dover | April 29, 2008 1:42 PM
"Ain't it kinda ironic how they force-feed these same convicts when they go on hunger strikes."
Better yet is that death-row inmates need to be medically cleared before they can be brought to the gas chamber or the chair.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 29, 2008 1:54 PM
Man, I suck at trolling. Sorry, Kevin, I thought I would drive more traffic and debate to your page than this. :)
Maybe when the spear-fishing orangutans sue for invasion of privacy or put out an anti-vaccine press release we can all meet back and discuss that. :)
Posted by: rpenner | April 29, 2008 4:25 PM
Sorry not to have come back earlier.
I think we're talking across each other.
Ira - If every inmate gets the same trays 3 times a day that add up to x calories, then yes no one's being treated differently. My argument is that treating everyone the same isn't fair if it doesn't take account of the individual's circumstances. If x was set at 1000 calories then some could manage OK but most would probably struggle. Just because it's an adequate allocation for some, that doesn't make it fair. If you increase it very slightly then that makes it better for a few people but it's still not fair. It then becomes a sorites problem - at what point does the allocation become fair? If you're saying that a limit of 2,300 is OK then you ought to be able to justify it in these terms. A limit of 3000 would probably satisfy nearly everyone but if you're going to set it that high then why have a limit at all? Just for the sake of it? Or just to make the fat guy hungry?
I agree this may well be ruled to be a frivolous or vexation claim, I just think he's got a reasonable argument whether he chooses to make it or not.
Rpenner - I'm not addressing either wants or needs. I'm making an assertion, which seems reasonably well founded, that the guy is hungry on a regime while other prisoners are not, and expressing an opinion that this situation is not fair.
The quality of the food, lobster or whatever, is not apparently an issue here.
I'm not sure about the tax analogy - probably the best (that is, the one that suits my argument) comparison is that a progressive tax that takes some account of individual circumstances is fairer than flat rate which does not. This might invite a proposal for a "progressive" calorie limit but I'm conscious that that's a bit ridiculous - it does though lead back to the question of why have a limit at all?
I'm not well enough up on US case law to know whether the government needs to consider what I call his "individual circumstances". As you imply this is probably a matter for the courts. Not sure that same sex marriages have any bearing on this particular case because, as you say, this is about eligibility to opt in to relevant state & federal privileges and not (one would hope) a matter of compulsion.
Posted by: Gav | April 29, 2008 5:18 PM
"If x was set at 1000 calories then some could manage OK but most would probably struggle. Just because it's an adequate allocation for some, that doesn't make it fair."
Jesus H. Christ, Gavin, sir, think about what you're saying. This fucking guy is not struggling. He's complaining because he doesn't get to stuff himself in the manner he was accustomed to when he was a free man plotting felonies that he proceeded to execute incompetently and lethally.
He still weighs over 300 pounds, sir, which, unless he's 14 feet tall, would make him the most bloated starvation victim on record. If he keeps wasting away once he's down to a weight more suitable for a putative primate -- say, 180 pounds 00then maybe he can be evaluated for hypothyroidism and treated appropriately. Giving up your freedom can mean giving up certain behaviors that set you apart from the herd in unnecessary ways.
What about inmates used to smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day, sir? If everyone is allowed 10 puffs a day, are the former overindulgers being treated unfairly?
This is a simple case of a fat motherfucker who's being deprived of hs usual excess load of food and not liking it, sir. I agreed in the OP that his frequent intense hunger is real to him, but this doesn't mean I believe he should get to slake it. Fuck him and piss on the lawyer who drafted the woe-is-me language in his lawsuit.
If I had a point in relating this to the kind of horseshit you can find at BigFatBlog.com, it's that when those people claim they don't "overeat," they're being truthful inasmuch as they don't just eat for the heck of it so they can be fatter than everyone else. They do get hungrier more often for whatever reason, sir, and this undoubtedly leads them to believe they're eating less than they say they do. Few people write down and objectively assess their food intake, and there's little question that fat people who don't like themselves are especially negligent in this regard (not that they're obligated to drop weight, but despite what they say, none of them want to be fat; they're miserable).
Then there's the whole bullshit "set point" idea, but I won't get into that just yet.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 29, 2008 6:11 PM
I still think we're talking across each other but I agree your point about smokers is a valid analogy. I'll say no more.
Posted by: Gav | April 29, 2008 8:08 PM
Gav, sir, it's not that you're not, broadly speaking, making sensible points. It's probably that you're not contextualizing this in the way I admittedly feel needs to be done. Unless the inmate somehow stands wrongly accused, what we have here is a hugely fat cold-blooded murderer who is whining that the state isn't feeding him enough (and isn't using its $1 million kitchen to warm his food). So he can't gorge himself any more Cry me a river. Fuck this piece of shit, fat or otherwise.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 29, 2008 9:53 PM
"It's probably that you're not contextualizing this in the way I admittedly feel needs to be done. Unless the inmate somehow stands wrongly accused, what we have here is a hugely fat cold-blooded murderer who is whining that the state isn't feeding him enough (and isn't using its $1 million kitchen to warm his food)."
That is the crux of the problem: this guy isn't a cold-blooded murderer - yet. You, and the State of Arkansas apparently feel that the fact that this guy is on remand is sufficient to treat him as if he were guilty of the crime for which he is, as yet, only a suspect. It doesn't matter if the police have absolute proof of this fellow's guilt (and if it has taken them 8 months to get him to trial, I'm guessing they don't), until he has been found guilty in a court of law, he is only a suspect. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.
Look at it this way, if you, having spent all these years attempting to qualify for the Olympic Trials, while preparing to take one last bash at the Q time, were arrested, kept on remand for 8 months, and fed in such a way that you packed on 100 pounds, wouldn't you feel aggrieved that the state has effectively ruined all the plans that you had made for yourself?
You may not agree with this guy's life choices, but you should agree with his right to make them, at least up to the point where he is proven guilty of a crime.
Posted by: hopper3011 | April 30, 2008 3:05 AM
I admit I considered that, Hopper -- this guy is incarcerated but he's not a convict. That said, if he's found innocent at trial or by some remote chance released before then on the basis of wrongful imprisonment, his feeding woes will have been the least of his problems. The bottom line is that being denied a huge amount of calories does not constitute mistreatment.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | April 30, 2008 11:10 AM
Can someone make a coherent point other than the four I listed above?
1) The majority of the expert may say the jail nutritionist is wrong and this particular plaintiff needs more calories than he is getting.
2) He doesn't need to get more calories, but he (and everybody else) has a Federal right to be fat that trumps the state's autonomy in reasonable, uniform, and cost-effective custodial care
3) He doesn't need to get more calories, and he has no right to be fat, but he is unhappy and should be medicated to make jail a less unhappy place
4) He doesn't need to get more calories, and he has no right to be fat, and he is unhappy because he is hungry and that is a different class of unhappiness than the other classes of reasons people are unhappy in jail (like not being able to change the channel on the TV or not being able to smoke when one wants or not being able to starve to death or not being able to attend your son's wedding, or being bored because every day in jail is more or less like every other, etc.)
I have some sympathy for 4, but I don’t think I’ve seen a good case for it made, and I mention above the proper remedy for 4 is not necessarily to let him eat as much as he wants.
So the way I see it is:
hopper3011 seems to be arguing 2, which seems wholly preposterous to me.
Gav is arguing for 1, which I have no basis to think is true, and then it falls back to 4.
Gav thinks that being hungry is in a special class is that this one guy is especially hungry, but everyone is going to experience jail in a different way. Some people take it harder than others. That may not be fair but the state is hardly in the position to craft equally unenjoyable jail time for all of its inmates.
Posted by: rpenner | April 30, 2008 4:56 PM
If someone of normal or below average weight were to sue the jail over feeling hungry all the time, my bet is that no one would even pay attention, and the people here being sympathetic to this loser would not be sympathetic to a lean person making exactly the same complaints.
If this human turd is getting 2300 calories a day or more than he has no basis for making an issue out of it. People who really think he might deserve more just because he likes to eat must have landed here from a distant planet sometime last week. Or were on the fucking OJ jury!
Posted by: Ira Fews | April 30, 2008 5:55 PM
We have bail bond hearings and decisions reasonably soon after one is arrested. This helps the person who is training for the olympics and wouldnt want to get fat on million dollar kitchen cuisines as an inmate. However, if one does not qualify for bail, often because the evidence presented by the state is rather too damning or if the court thinks the person is not safe to be parolled out until trial date, then the institution forces the person to suffer the institutionalized diet. This is the balance that we strike in societies where the safety of the public is weighed against the notions of due process for the individual. If Mr.Laswell had been eligible for bail, then he would have been at home hugging his mountain of sugar on his own dime. Did anyone see that Simpsons episode where Homer gets his own mountain of sugar in the front yard ?
Quite a few years ago, when I was very peeved about the tax payer funded local jail that cost $65 a night to incarcerate someone, I recommended to my congress person that we ought to outsource this. That was the time soon after NAFTA; so I asked why not let our convicted occupy the Mexican Jails and pay $10 to $15 per night-person. It would save money, provide employment to locals (they dont have to come here illegally) and may even be a deterrent for those returnees who had served time. It may also increase an appreciation for the good fortune to be living in the USA. However, the downside would be the export of jobs ( the great sucking sound of Ross Perot ), the loss of business to private jails in the US, and the idea of "cruel and unusual punishement" that US citizens are protected from. Just like any other NIMBY, I got a stanadard constituent form letter back from my congress person.
Posted by: skrishnan | April 30, 2008 11:46 PM
Before I was incarcerated, I used to be a big outdoorsman, and I feel unhappy whenever I am indoors. Now, everyone gets an equal hour outside in the yard, but I feel I should get more given my past history as an outdoorsman and the intense pain I feel at not getting to stay out longer. I also used to read a lot of philosophy, and even though every prisoner has equal access to the library, I feel it is understrocked with philosophy, and that I should have my own personal bookshelf of philosophy classsics in my own cell, given my bibliophilia, to ease my existential angst.
This is the type of stuff I'd be writing if I were ever a prisoner. Good thing I'm not, or I'd use the same inane tactics as our 300 lbs friend here to get whatever priveleges were denied me.
Posted by: Saint Gasoline | May 3, 2008 4:01 AM