Momentum is finally building to address longstanding and systemic problems at Michigan’s only women’s prison as state lawmakers, local elected officials, and activists demand answers about mold, medical care, a recent death, and the treatment of a woman whose health has rapidly declined.
Over the past five years, lawsuits, medical records, and internal state reports have documented sexual abuse, toxic mold, unsafe living conditions, retaliation, invasive strip searches, coercive labor practices, freezing temperatures, and failures in medical care at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Pittsfield Township in Washtenaw County, about 40 miles west of Detroit.
Yet Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration has not detailed what reforms, if any, are underway and has declined to answer Metro Times’s questions about conditions at the facility for more than a year, and that remained the case this month…