At least 12 people have died of diabetes in Georgia jails and prisons where they were not given treatment that would have kept them healthy in the last decade.
Their blood sugars spiked to many times the normal range, they were flippantly denied insulin, and their their symptoms were dismissed by guards and staffers that wrote off incoherence and days of vomiting as substance abuse or mental illness.
Some 2.3 million Americans are confined in the massive US prison system where their health is often neglected and care is extraordinarily expensive.
For at least 12 men and women, prison was a death sentence, unrelated to their crimes, but because their treatable disease was ignored, a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation reveals.
Willie Whaley died at just 31 at the Georgia State Prison of diabetic ketoacidosis (AKD). He was given insulin for two days, then denied the injections after he tested positive for methamphetamine while in the prison's medical center
The US has the largest population of incarcerated people in the world.
In fact, there are about as many Americans in prisons, jails and other corrections facilities than there people in the entire country of Botswana (and about twice as many as live in Cyprus).
But as the prison system has stretched and grown, care for the people living within it hasn't, and their neglect is not only hurting prisoners, but has begun to have echoes in the health of the population at large.
Rates of both mental and chronic illness are much higher among incarcerated people than among the general population.
During intake, people going to jails and prisons are supposed to have a medical examination and continue or start to receive any medications or treatments appropriate to treating their conditions.
But correctional facility guidelines say that a prisoner has to be examined and have his or her medical history taken within 14 days of intake.
'And obviously someone with type 1 diabetes is going to be dead' without insulin for two weeks, says Dr Daniel Lorber, chair of the American Diabetes Association's National Advocacy Committee.
Willie Whaley was admitted to the medical center at Georgia State Prison in December 2017, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reported.
Willie Green III (left) had been needed insulin since his 20s, but died of DKA at a hospital less than two weeks after he was booked in Fulton County Jail in 2017. After violating his probation, Paul Mullinax (right) lost his life to diabetes-related complications
He'd been nauseous and vomiting - early signs of a diabetes-related condition called diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA).
For the first two days that he was in medical, Willie, who had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a child, was given insulin.
But then Willie started talking nonsense. The suspicious correctional facility staff drug tested him.
When the screen came back positive for methamphetamines, the medical staff stopped giving Willie insulin.
It is unclear what other diabetes drugs Willie might have been on, but one of the most common such prescriptions, Metformin, is known to occasionally show up as a false positive on drug screens.
Three days after coming to the medical center, Willie was dead.
He was never put back on insulin and never saw a physician, according to the AJC.
At 41, Douglas Brown (left) died in 2013 of DKA after just 11 days at Fulton County Prison in Georgia. taff at Hays State Prison finally realized that Esteban Mosqueda-Romero (right), 63, was ill and took him to a hospital, but it was too late for him to recover form DKA
But an autopsy cited his diabetic medical history and revealed that Willie's blood sugar was five-times what it should have been for a 31-year-old.
Willie's mother, Rebecca Hill, plans to file a lawsuit against the facility for her son's death.
A typical person with type 1
