Gedney is a great storyteller and she reaffirms by writing her life story that all human beings deserve respect, that even in the harshest of conditions one doctor can heal the mind and body and do the real work of corrections. She spent the next 28 years as a dedicated physician in that yard.ĭr. They had responded to her because she actually cared about them, she had tried to help them, and this made all the difference. The outpouring of support on behalf of the inmates was completely disarming to Dr. “He broke the convict code,” one of her patients said. In fact, they were outraged at what their fellow prisoner had done. The remarkable thing is that the ones who really cared, the ones who reached out to her with real sympathy and concern were the inmates themselves. Gedney, however, did not miss a beat and she showed up for work on Monday to find her office in disarray and not one of her coworkers or administrators saying anything about what happened.

This happened ironically on a Friday the 13 th, a couple of weeks before Halloween. Gedney’s office covered in blood with a big hole in the wall where a grenade had been thrown. The ensuing lockdown and siege lasted for hours, leaving the inmate dead and Dr. Two years into her assignment she was taken hostage in her office and sexually assaulted by a suicidal inmate. She was thrown into a kind of lion’s den and expected to fend for herself. In the beginning, she didn’t have a supervisor, a handbook of procedures, or anyone to turn to for guidance or questions. Gedney’s prison yard was dysfunctional would be an understatement. In the era of President Reagan, there was a push to privatize prisons and get government out of the business of running them. It turned out that the State of Nevada had been sued for millions of dollars for not providing adequate medical care for its state inmates. In a trial by fire as a young woman doctor placed in a men’s penitentiary, she confronted cold indifference at best by prison administrators, and downright hostility by nurses and other medical staff on the yard. Karen Gedney took the Hippocratic Oath over 30 years ago and accepted an assignment at a state prison in Carson City that was originally supposed to last 4 years. Book Review: 30 Years Behind Bars: Trials of a Prison Doctor

30 Years Behind Bars by Karen Gedney