Journal Entry: Sharon Y Johnson-01/12/2025-Journaling from BOP Atwood

Journal Entry

The African American Diaspora is grossly under represented within the health care arena, with the over whelming amount of health disparities within our community it would be beneficial to ensure that we have an equivalent amount of culturally competent health care providers to meet the needs of minorities. As a collective, we offer platinum care for the commented we serve across our Great Nation. Our services are needed from the urban core to rural areas. It is most unfortunate that we are denied opportunities avaible to provide quality health care services within underserved communities.

Some of the specific that we face are as follows:

  1. Licensure issues within the following agates Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and New York
  2. Excessive restitution, fines, and length of the exclusionary practices with the U. S. department of Health and Human Services some individuals were not given credit for the actual work that was performed during there indictment. ( I was not given credit because my attorney was not an Health Care attorney and he was a criminal defense attorney. So I am to pay half million back in restitution.
  3. Under representation within low to moderate income communities which make our collective struggle representative and indicative of the issues within the greater urbn and rural minority communities.
  4. Denial of access to Government payor source ie Medicare. Medicaid. Tricare which serves as the primary payor source. for underserved, low to moderate income communities.
  5. Unjust Exclusion from the health care arena and shutting black owned health care providers and changing the education requirement for health care providers but when Covid hit the front line workers were people of color.

We have formed a coalition at Atwood that will be addressing these issues as a LLC outside of prision, the group started by addressing letters to our Senators to request immediate assistance from you and their staff concerning excessively long sentences for inmates, including myself and then after arriving at this camp I found that several inmates had the same crime and there time was much shorter than mine. Thousands of Adults In custody have been left behind under the First Step Act. We are looking to partner with any organization on the outside to help change the prision sentence for Women.
We are looking for outside support.