When judges hand down sentences for crimes, they don’t usually order hallucinations, seizures, headaches and muscle cramps.

That would be cruel.

Yet, too often, inmates experience some extra-judiciary punishment by way of drug withdrawal in jails when they don’t receive their doctor-prescribed medications.

Last week, an emergency hearing convened after a woman, incarcerated in Leelanau County jail for a drug-related conviction, experienced symptoms that she and her mother connected to seizures. For a week, she said she was not given lorazepam, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, seizure disorders and sleeping problems. The drug was reportedly administered about an hour before an emergency court hearing on the matter.

In 2021, a Grand Traverse County inmate had to go to court to get Vyvanse, a medicine used to treat diagnosed attention deficit disorder. In another case, an inmate’s prescription access for suboxone, used to treat substance use disorder, became the basis of a ACLU suit and a $25,000 settlement.

Prescriptions are hardly champagne and caviar for these inmates. They are basic, and potentially life-saving, necessities.

In 2019, Paul Bulthouse, 39, who was incarcerated in Muskegon County’s jail following a probation violation, died after suffering multiple seizures, court records show. Bulthouse was prescribed klonopin, a sedative used to manage seizures and panic attacks; his family said he did not receive it.

In the end, Muskegon County Board of Commissioners settled for $2.4 million with Bulthouse’s family, and the four Muskegon County jail guards pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of willful neglect of duty.

Not providing medications — especially those used to treat substance use disorder that are shown to prevent withdrawal, relapse and overdose — is a dangerous and pervasive practice.

The Marshall Project found in 2022, that even though the First Step Act requires prisons to provide addiction medications, only 10 percent of 15,000 eligible prisoners get them.

Just this past week, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services sent out a notice seeking proposals to expand medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) programs in Michigan county jails — using opioid settlement money.

In Rhode Island, all three forms of MOUD medications are used in its correctional system, resulting in a nearly two-thirds reduction in statewide opioid overdose deaths.

This U.S Food and Drug Administration-approved, evidence-based method can save lives, preventing relapse and overdose post-incarceration.

Medication should be delivered to the inmates in a controlled, secure way so the medication isn’t abused. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay out unnecessary court settlements to the families of the inmates either.

We believe that getting this right will make a difference, not only to prisoners and inmates, but for those in charge of their care.

Let people do the time for the crime the way the judges intended – and just give these inmates their meds.

— Traverse City Record-Eagle