Homeward journey for county jail monitor
Shansky oversees facilities biannually
Twice a year, Ronald Shansky returns to his hometown of Milwaukee.
But instead of visiting his old neighborhood, or looking up old classmates from Washington High School or the Medical College of Wisconsin, he settles in downtown for a long workweek.
Shansky, 72, a physician, is the court-appointed monitor of the long-troubled Milwaukee County Jail.
“Colleagues kind of see me as a grand old man of correctional health,” Shansky said during a recent interview.
No one, least of all Shansky, could imagine that he would be making the trek to his hometown for so many years to monitor medical services at the Milwaukee County Jail and House of Correction.
His inspections are done under terms of a 2001 legal settlement between Milwaukee County and inmates, known as the “Christensen decree.”
Since his first visit under the decree in 2002, Milwaukee County has paid Shansky more than $329,000, according to records provided by the county.
By comparison, in recent years the county spent nearly $450,000 to provide around-the-clock security at the home of former Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr.
As the court-appointed monitor, Shansky has wide latitude to check on anything and everything within the medical and mental health part of the jail. He’ll review charts, talk with staff, hone in on critical incidents and write a detailed report.
It is a difficult and taxing job. Since April 2016, there have been seven deaths at the jail.
Shansky, who now lives in Texas, spoke at length about his career, motivations and hopes that health care for offenders has improved over the decades in the U.S. While declining to discuss specifics at the Milwaukee County Jail, he discussed in general terms how he goes about evaluating facilities.
He made a strong case for offenders to have access to quality care.
“He’s a human being, and all
human beings, whether they do something wrong or not, deserve to be treated in a certain way,” he said.
“I’m constantly pushing the envelope because there’s a famous quote from Dostoyevsky who said you can determine the nature of justice in a society by walking into its prisons,” he added. “How we treat our most alienated people is a reflection on us.”
Shansky comes out of a Milwaukee from another era. His father, Louis, was a dentist and his mother, Ann, was school teacher. He and his two brothers grew up on N. 50th St., around a block and a quarter from W. Burleigh Ave.
“In those days, Milwaukee was a progressive city with great after-school programs and activities at several of the playgrounds around the city,” he said.
His parents instilled in him the desire to serve others.
“When you’re a kid, you just want to help people,” he said.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he went to the Medical College of Wisconsin, then located on Milwaukee’s west side, and graduated in 1971.
“I am to some extent a product of the 1960s,” he said. “And that reinforced my attitudes about serving people. And I felt the best opportunity to serve people would be doing primary care services as a general internist or family practitioner.”
He settled in Chicago after training at Cook County Hospital. He worked evenings in the then-newly opened federal jail in downtown Chicago in the early 1970s.
Later in the 1970s, as a result of prison and jail litigation, he was called in tolook at a prison case in southern Illinois. By 1982, he became the first medical director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, a job he held until 1993.
Except for a brief stint back in the Illinois state system, he has since worked as a consultant. Sometimes he’ll get contacted by lawyers and firms that want to pursue cases involving inmate access to medical care. Authorities also contact him to serve as a monitor of facilities.
He has a long record of working as a special master in court cases and a medical specialist on prisons and jails throughout the country.
“My goal is for me to help the staff provide reasonable quality services,” he said. “I could say if I was a religious person, that’s my calling.”
It was in the 1990s when he did his first inspection of the Milwaukee County Jail on behalf of plaintiff attorneys who represented inmates. He recalled being deposed by a county attorney about staffing and was asked how he accounted for the fact that the death rate at the facility was not higher than average.
“I said, ‘luck,’ ” Shansky recalled. Months later, in July 1999, a once-prominent Milwaukee attorney who had led the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, died while in custody at the jail after suffering a seizure caused by alcoholic ketoacidosis.
Eventually, Shansky was brought in to monitor the jail’s health care services.
For a few years, he didn’t come to Milwaukee because all of the medical and mental health leadership positions at the jail were vacant, he said.
Speaking in general terms about the state of health in America’s prisons, he said, “We’re doing a lot of things that should impact positively on the quality of services provided.”
Acting Milwaukee County Sheriff Richard Schmidt said he has long dealt with Shansky and they have a good working relationship.
“Bottom line, there are two specific pieces to the consent decree, the population cap and the medical and mental health piece,” Schmidt said. “I’ve worked on part two of that with Doctor Shansky. It has been an extremely long laborious process to try and get the consent decree finished.”
In late October, Schmidt said he asked Shansky what the county would need to do to achieve compliance with the consent decree by May 2018. Medical services at the jail are contracted out to Armor Correctional Health Services.
Schmidt said Shansky spoke of three specific things he wanted to see accomplished, including regular dental appointments and expeditious reviews of medical charts and records for offenders after offsite appointments.
But the biggest piece Shansky wanted, according to Schmidt, was the hiring of a full-time chief psychiatrist to work the first shift.
Schmidt said Armor indicated it would be difficult to hire a full-time psychiatrist. But he remained hopeful it could be accomplished.
Shansky also has pushed to lower the medical staff’s job vacancy rate. According to his spring 2017 report, there was a 33.3% vacancy rate of required medical positions, including a nurse vacancy rate of 52%.
In a statement, Armor said its “Milwaukee-based mental health staff continue to provide quality patient care to inmates housed in the Milwaukee County Jail and House of Corrections.”
Armor said it responded to Shanksy’s request and”promptly began interviewing psychiatrist candidates to work the first shift” and hoped to “make an offer soon.”
In the meantime, Shansky continues his work. He has no plans to slow down.
Asked if one day it would be possible he would no longer have to come to Milwaukee as a jail monitor, he said, “Yes.”
“This is an unusual case,” he said. “The vast majority of cases are finished within five to 10 years. And this case waxed and waned, but I’m extremely optimistic.”