Healing Neen

Laura Cain and Thom Stromer produced the new documentary feature Healing Neen, which tells the incredible story of Tonier “Neen” Cain, a nationally-known speaker and educator who became a consumer advocate after a lifetime of abuse and drug addiction. Tonier was recently featured on a episode of WYPR's The Signal. Healing Neen will screen on April 29 at the Creative Alliance at The Patterson.

Why film?

Laura Cain: My background is as a civil rights attorney, and film is the most effective medium to shine a light on difficult subjects. It has an unparalleled power to move and change people. Documentaries are also the best vehicle for giving a voice to people who are normally silenced. I strive to make choices that are best for the film while still being faithful to those that bravely agreed to talk about their lives. I love learning the craft and tapping into another creative outlet and, as a bonus, I’ve gotten to work with some people who are not only really talented, but also generous and loving spirits.

Thom Stromer: Film hits so immediately to the brain and heart. Good films give me the same feeling I have when listening to extraordinary music. The thing I love about the Film community in Baltimore is its unity in diversity. I’m friends with so many people who work on Dramas or Horror or Comedy or Experimental etc. and I primarily work in Documentary but we are all friends and really appreciate the process each goes through to create what we do. We openly cheer for each other’s success.

What was your first job/experience in film?

TS: I started part time in the video department at the Baltimore Aquarium. I was hired to run the AV portion of the dolphin shows. In my down time I’d help the full time staff produce videos for exhibits, documentaries, or promotion. From there I was hired full time and began to shoot and edit all the time. It was great. I got to travel a lot and got into underwater filming. From doing so many aspects of production, I learned that I love editing the most. I’m really just a studio rat.

LC: In 2005, I secured grant money to make a short documentary about trauma survivors and their experiences with coercion in the psychiatric system. Thom was my editor and co-producer. That film, Behind Closed Doors, has spread like wild fire in all the systems, criminal justice, mental health, juvenile justice, substance abuse, domestic violence and social services, all across the country and abroad. I couldn’t be happier with the impact it’s having in terms of changing the way systems treat vulnerable people. It was also an official selection at the Maryland and Baltimore Women’s Film Festivals, which was pretty exciting for me, as a first time filmmaker.

Do you have a favorite work experience? Why was it your favorite?

LC: Making Healing Neen. Taking this journey back in time with Tonier-- inside the prison, under the bridge where she lived, on the streets of Annapolis where she was beaten and raped over and over again--affected me deeply. Ben Baker-Lee, our DP and Director of Animation, is so talented, generous of spirit and a really great guy to hang out with on shoots. Meeting Caleb Stine, who scored the film, was another highlight. When he sent the lyrics that he wrote for the film, I literally wept with joy. And working with Thom was phenomenal. Not only is he immensely talented, he’s honest, caring and very supportive. The level of trust and respect that we developed as partners in this effort is unlike any that I have experienced before.

TS: My favorite work experience has to be Healing Neen. It was so incredible to work with such creative freedom and with a definite intention as to what we wanted to say. Plus, working with Laura, Ben, Caleb, David, Matt and Nick was a dream come true. Everyone was so casual and open. There was no Hollywood attitude. We just flowed. Everyone really put their heart into this.

What's the best advice you ever got?

LC: Ben Baker-Lee told me to trust my instincts and not worry about my lack of formal training, which he said meant only that I wouldn’t get tripped up by the “rules” of how a film is supposed to be made. Ben probably doesn’t know this, but his advice gave me the confidence I needed as Thom and I pushed the boundaries of form and structure in making this film.

TS:“If you’re going Through Hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill told me that.

What was the worst advice you ever got?

TS: The worst has to be someone quoting a filmmaking book they read about how a documentary is “supposed” to be structured and saying we must follow the book’s instructions. I don’t believe that crap. I believe each film (particularly Documentary) is its own entity and you must learn to speak its language. You must recognize what you have and shape it from there. It’s not a pre-fabricated form that you populate with footage.

LC: I got the same bad advice to follow a “how to” book on documentary filmmaking when I started on Healing Neen, and only one chapter into it, I was both scared and really annoyed. I later learned that Frederick Wiseman, whose work is touted in those same books, completely thumbed his nose at the conventional wisdom on documentary filmmaking. Wiseman was a very instinctual filmmaker, not a paint-by-numbers drone. He also started off as a civil rights lawyer, so I feel as though I am following the lead of kindred spirit.

How did you choose/develop Healing Neen?

LC: Tonier and I started doing speaking engagements in connection with Behind Closed Doors. She is a phenomenally gifted speaker-- powerful, engaging and very, very funny, which allows audiences to take in the truly awful parts of her story. In 2008, she took me around Annapolis, where she grew up and lived on the streets. Seeing these places that she talks about brought the story to life in a way that words---no matter how effectively delivered—cannot match. That’s when the idea formed to make a documentary about her life. I went to the State mental health administration, which had funded Behind Closed Doors, and they agreed to fund this project.

TS: Laura kept telling me about Tonier’s achievements after we finished Behind Closed Doors. I was stoked to hear that she was on such an incredible course. I was fascinated by her. Her story really spoke to me because I had struggled with and beaten my own substance abuse issues. I was amazed that she could have dropped to such a low point but then come back even stronger. The fact she had done all the normal rehab programs before and failed but, when she entered TAMAR’s Children, she found a program that worked for her was incredible.

What do you hope audiences take away from Healing Neen?

LC: That we need to get serious about protecting children. Society pays so little attention to the common, everyday brutalization and neglect that they endure. Child maltreatment is not just a problem for these kids as individuals. The shockingly high rates of childhood abuse and neglect among prisoners, psychiatric patients, homeless people, drug addicts, etc., makes it impossible to ignore the enormous costs every one of us bears. I also hope that the film shatters assumptions and stereotypes about people living on the fringes of society. At the very least, I hope that audiences take Tonier into their hearts and reflect upon her shining example of the human spirit and resiliency in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

TS: I want people to think about how we are treating people with substance abuse issues and work towards more holistic methods of addressing their needs. When an addict hits rock bottom they need systems in place that they can access immediately to put them on the road to recovery. Putting them on a waiting list for access to the program is ridiculous. They’ll go back to using if they can’t get help right there. I’d also like people to see that warehousing people in prisons is not a solution. We have the highest prison population of anywhere in the world. We need to stop this revolving door of recidivism due to minor infractions and police profiling.

How did you decide on the rather unconventional structure for the piece and what was the process during editing?

TS: Our initial discussions involved a very conventional, linear sense of Tonier’s life from birth until now and the experts would pop in to discuss the relevant part of her life as it applied to where we were at in her life timeline. I felt that would be too much like holding the hand of the audience and guiding them along and that it would fall flat. Laura was completely open to working in a non-linear form that allowed emotion and rhythm to guide us rather than chronological time. There was a lot of moving things around, reworking within scenes, and ultimately ditching sequences, even if we had grown attached to them.

LC: Tonier’s story was ingrained in my being by the time we started editing. I also knew the contextual information that I wanted to incorporate so that her story became more universal. I agreed with Thom about not trying to follow a strictly chronological timeline. And then there are all those rules about when to reveal information, that you need conflict building toward resolution, etc. We had to scrap all of that. But we also had to start somewhere, and I put a lot of time and effort into writing the initial script. After that, we went back and forth and continued to shape it, rather than trying to force the elements into any pre-conceived form. We knew that it was risky, because audiences are used to conventional structure, but we trusted their willingness to go along for the ride, wherever it might take them.

How did you end up filming the family Thanksgiving? How did you put that scene together?

LC: We invited ourselves to Thanksgiving because we wanted to try and bring Tonier’s family into the story, particularly her mother, Barbara. I knew that there was a risk that they would just play to the camera and that turned out to be the case. But, with cameras rolling for hours on end, you are bound to catch moments where guards are down and the truth is revealed. As tempting as it was, we decided that it would be wrong to cast Barbara as a one-dimensional villain. I am really happy that the scene allows viewers to decide whether to hate her, pity her, or both. This was the one scene I didn’t even try to script. After lengthy discussions about what we wanted this scene to achieve, Thom offered to take it on. I bow humbly to his skill in wading through a morass of footage and crafting a tight, coherent and gut-wrenching scene.

TS: The first cut of ONLY that scene was an hour and a half. I had to deal with it as a separate entity. This was the most difficult scene to cut. We had 3 cameras rolling, no time code synch, and no real shooting plan in the chaos that is a family gathering. It came out to be 11 hours of footage. I had to manually synch everything and lay it out chronologically. After that was done we could really see what we had. Being a fly on the wall of this family gathering was fascinating but the emotional intensity of the event made it very, very difficult to work with. Seeing all the children in the midst of this was so heart wrenching because you know that’s the next generation who may succeed or drown. The biggest issue was how do we handle Tonier’s mother, Barbara? We could have edited the scene and make her look 20 times worse than she does. I tried to let her speak for herself.

What are your future plans?

TS: Promote this film. . . Promote this film and Promote this film. We want as many people as possible to see this film. We are entering it into Film festivals, we are setting up private screenings, we are open to any and all ideas to get as many eyeballs on this film. We hope it will touch them and push them into helping the homeless, addicted, incarcerated, abused, traumatized people that are in our lives right now… we hope this causes a butterfly effect of caring and compassion.

LC: After we’ve pushed Healing Neen as far as it can go, Thom and I definitely want to work together again. We both have ideas germinating in our brains. Personally, I hope to make a film about men and trauma. Men experience and react to trauma differently and it’s a subject that hasn’t been explored. There was also some talk about possible funding for a film about people that self-injure, most often by cutting themselves. It’s another taboo subject that needs to be brought out into the open.

Where can Examiner readers find out more about you and/or see more of your work?

TS: healingneen.com is the best resource to connect to all the artists/activists involved with this project. Also, I will have a website at www.thomstromer.com but I’m just building it now.

LC: Readers can email us through a link on the contact page on the Healing Neen website. Getting a website up for In The Hollow Films, is on my to-do-list.

Published 04/21/10, Copyright © 2010 Baltimore Movie Examiner, Baltimore, Md.

Less than a decade ago, Tonier Cain's main concern was drugs, and how she'd get her next high. But that was all before 2004, before she went through recovery and gave birth to her youngest daughter. Now she travels around the nation telling others how they can turn their lives around, much like she did. And in about a month, she'll become more of a celebrity when a documentary about her life is released. Called "Healing Neen," the short film will talk about Cain's upbringing in Annapolis' Clay Street community and how a cycle of childhood abuse led her to a life of drugs and crime. Two versions of the film - one a 23-minute version that can be used at conferences and an 54-minute version with more details about her life - will be available online or on DVD for free. It is still being edited and should be available sometime in mid-February. Versions also will be available through the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care where Cain works. "Tonier is such a beautiful and charismatic today, yet six years ago, people were dismissing her as a drug addict," said Laura Cain, one of the filmmakers on the project who is no relation to Tonier Cain. "If (the audience) sees how successful she is now, we're hoping (the documentary) will inspire people to support others who were where she was six years ago." Tonier Cain, whose nickname is "Neen," is the oldest of 10 children and started drinking alcohol at age 9. She was sexually abused as a child and experimented with drugs, eventually discovering crack cocaine. She married as a teenager and had a child. After they divorced, her ex-husband retained custody of their son, who is now an adult. Over the years, she delved further and further into drug abuse, often resorting to crime to get money to get high. There were times where she was homeless and slept under bridges and ate from trash cans. She became pregnant three more times, and her children, who are also adults, were adopted. Cain learned she was pregnant in 2004 while incarcerated in the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup. She didn't want to give up another child and received the help of Tamar Inc., which helped recently paroled women raise their children. She was paroled into the program and her daughter was born that summer. During that time, she received therapy that helped her understand how her childhood abuse was the main reason behind her drug use, she said. "I've been in a lot of programs, but nothing helped until my trauma was addressed," Cain said. "(The drugs and the homelessness) those were just symptoms of my trauma. Once that was treated, all of that fell away. I'm employed, I'm a homeowner, it's beyond me that I'm a national spokesperson in a field. Just to be able to say I'm a whole individual now. I'm healed, and that's what 'Healing Neen' is about." Cain first caught the filmmakers' attention after she appeared in the documentary film "Behind Closed Doors." In it, she was one of four women who spoke about struggles to overcome childhood abuse. Cain's life was selected as a subject for another project. Filming began in summer 2008, where cameras followed Cain through her old haunts in Annapolis, some in boarded up houses on Clay Street where used to sit outside and get high. It also shows her reuniting with some old friends she knew when she was using drugs, and talking about trauma with substance abuse caseworkers. There also is footage of Cain in her former cell at the Jessup prison. She selects a few female inmates to discuss their childhood trauma and many of them open up with stories about childhood abuse and incest. These days, Cain works with the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care, which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Through her work, she travels around the country educating others about the impact of trauma. This week, she was headed to Delaware to give a presentation on trauma to foster care and adoption workers. "It's not about what's wrong with a person, it's about what happened to someone," Cain said. "It's about asking 'what happened' and being prepared to hear the answer."

Published 01/07/10, Copyright © 2010 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.

For the longest time, home was a tent city under a bridge. It was the public housing projects. Or a prison cell. Toni Cain knew there were people who lived in nice houses, people who owned their homes and took good care of them. People who had chances in life. She knew just as well that she wasn't one of them. "I believed people were born into stations, and there was nothing they could do," says Cain, 40. "Some people live in houses on a hill, and some people live down with the roaches." The roaches will miss her. This weekend Cain moves into her own house in Brooklyn, purchased through Arundel Habitat for Humanity. She is the eldest of 10, and she is not only the first of her siblings to own a home, but the first in her family going back to her great-grandparents. For Cain, and for anyone who knows her, it is proof that your station is not your destiny. She was molested as a child, started drinking at age 9 and was placed in foster care at 12. She attempted suicide at 14, was married at 17, and abandoned by her husband at 19. That was when she started using crack cocaine. The state took away three of her children, after a daughter was born two months premature with cocaine in her system. Cain was homeless, a streetwalker, a Dumpster diver. She was raped, beaten and arrested so many times that jail guards would say "Welcome back" when they saw her. "She was the kind of woman that people didn't make eye contact with on the street," says Joan Gillece, who started a prison counseling program that saved Cain. Gillece, who lives in Annapolis, thinks she must have driven by Cain countless times and never given a thought to the ragged woman on the side of the road. Now she turns heads. Cain wears smart power suits and receives standing ovations when she lectures on the dangers of addiction. She's a single mom, caring for a 3-year-old daughter and buying a house on her own. And when she goes to the red-light districts, it's to hug the women who sell their bodies, give them warm clothes and shoes, and tell them someone cares. Sometimes in bed at night, after Orlandra has gone to sleep in the pink room with the Dora the Explorer sheets, Cain cries to think of how far she's come. "How do you go," she wonders, "from living under a bridge to flying around the country?" Cain was a textbook case of trauma, but she never knew it until a state therapist's diagnosis. In mental health, trauma is an early experience that terrifies - abuse, neglect, homelessness, witnessing violence. It was Cain's life for too many years. She was born in Annapolis in 1967 to a mother who would live in the city's public housing and be supported through welfare. Cain's father was not a part of her life. Her mother's male friends molested her, she says, and she turned to her mother's liquor stash to deaden the pain. Cain's mother couldn't care for her children, and the state put them in foster care while relatives sorted it out. Cain ended up with an aunt, but the drinking didn't stop. She realized she was an alcoholic when she began sneaking liquor bottles into Annapolis High School and drinking in the bathroom. At 17, she married a man who was 24. "I was a child bride," she says. Her mother signed the papers, since a 17-year-old isn't allowed to marry on her own. Maybe there's a good reason for that, Cain says now. She had a son, Keith, and then her husband left after two years of marriage. One weekend, her husband picked up Keith and never brought him back. Cain figured she was in no position to fight, though over the years she would look for her boy. "She was a prostitute, a crackhead, a streetwalker," says Annapolis police Detective John Lee, who arrested Cain at least a half-dozen times over the years. "Somebody like that doesn't even have a life expectancy." Cain gave birth to a boy, Brandon, in 1988 and a girl, Whitney, in 1989. The girl was two months premature, born with cocaine in her system. She spent 10 days in the hospital, and the day that Cain could finally take her home - to her mother's apartment - police showed up and took both children away. The children entered foster care and were adopted. Cain let them go. "I didn't want to drag them through the lifestyle I was dragged through - alcoholism and drugs," she says. "I couldn't give them the love and affection they deserved." Another boy, Joshua, was born in 1991, and he, too, was taken away. That decade was marked by a descent into addiction and lawlessness. Her criminal record shows a score of charges, for drug possession, prostitution and disorderly conduct. Her mug shots show a woman who had reached bottom. In 2003, Cain learned that she was pregnant again. She was devastated. "I couldn't imagine losing another child," she says. "It's a horrible, horrible thing, and I just couldn't survive that." Arrested again, she was at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup when she heard of a program called Tamar's Children. It offered counseling and anti-addiction help for pregnant women in the system. Cain finally found a reason to pull herself together: the child she was about to have. She enrolled in the program and found herself living at the old convent at St. Ambrose Church in Northwest Baltimore with four other women. There she realized the trauma she had suffered and began to understand why she had never been able to care for her children. "I was always treated like I was nothing, so I made decisions in my life like I was nothing," she says. In the convent, she grieved for the children she had lost and learned how to care for her new daughter, Orlandra. The program helped her find a job and an apartment in Towson. A caseworker checked in on her every week. She learned about Habitat for Humanity, which offers no-interest loans on the houses it builds, and applied to buy a house. At first, she was turned down. Her credit was a mess. While living in Towson, she had been hit by a car and spent several days recovering at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The bills piled up. But Cain worked at Tamar Inc., which helped women affected by trauma, and paid down her debts. She began to travel the country, to lecture about addiction and trauma. Last January, she was approved for a Habitat house. In fact, Arundel Habitat was so impressed with her that this August the group hired her as its volunteer coordinator. "She's my hero," says Fred Reno, construction site supervisor for Arundel Habitat. "For 40 years, my hero was my high school football coach, and I think she's bumped him." Cain has not been in touch with the children she had when she was addicted, but an adoption caseworker has shared some details. Whitney and Brandon were adopted together, and Whitney is allergic to peanut butter and has asthma, like Cain as a child. Joshua is an honor roll student and wants to be an engineer. "I pray for them constantly," Cain says. Her new house is on Patapsco Avenue in Brooklyn - three bedrooms, yellow siding, a yard with a tree. Habitat will host a dedication ceremony today. Cain says she is starting a new chapter in her family's life. Indeed, three of her sisters have applied for Habitat houses. "Orlandra, unlike me, will grow up with the belief system that [says], `My mommy has a home. I can, too,'" Cain says. "I never thought that I was supposed to own a home. I was born into the projects, and I believed that's where I was supposed to stay. But that's not true." Last Saturday, Cain and a swarm of volunteers put the finishing touches on her house. She loved the details: the silver knobs on the kitchen cabinets, the gold accents on the light fixtures. She talked about planting tulips in the garden. And the volunteers - these people from the suburbs, these people who lived in houses on hills - were asking her questions. How high do you want these shelves, Toni? Where will these curtains go? She stood confident in the center of it all. She had found her station.

Published 12/15/07, Copyright © 2007 Baltmore Sun, Baltimore, Md.

It's not unusual for someone in the Clay Street community to recognize Tonier Cain, even if she's dressed in business attire and driving a car. For almost 16 years, Ms. Cain was a homeless crack addict and prostitute who roamed the streets of Annapolis. She was in and out of jail for various charges and over time gave birth to five children - three sons, ages 20, 18 and 15 and two daughters, 17 and 2. But these days, she fills her time running between Baltimore and Annapolis, maintaining Tamar Inc., an Annapolis-based agency that helps incarcerated mothers. When she's not working, she's spending time with her toddler, Orlandra. "Everything about me has changed," said the 38-year-old Ms. Cain, who also is a student at Anne Arundel Community College. "(The way I grew up), I thought that was the way it was supposed to be - you get on welfare, have all these children and just hang out. I thought that when a man beat on me it was because they loved me. I wouldn't allow a man to beat on me now." As Tamar Inc.'s director of advocacy services, Ms. Cain is helping coordinate a fundraiser tomorrow at Trinity Outreach Church on Gibraltar Road. The money raised will be used to open a residential program in Prince George's County for pregnant women who are incarcerated. Ms. Cain said the agency also plans to open a substance-abuse program for men in Anne Arundel County eventually. Tamar Inc. - which stands for Trauma, Addiction, Mental health and Recovery - opened in 2002 and has 57 women who have completed the program. The nonprofit agency also has the Tamar Community Project, which aims to help families affected by AIDS. "(Ms. Cain) is both our best and our typical (client)," said Dr. Andrea Karfgin, Tamar president and founder. "She is an example of if you give someone a real chance, they'll take it and go with it. I don't understand how she went through school and nobody saw how smart she was." A native of Annapolis, Ms. Cain is the oldest of 10 children. She started drinking alcohol at age nine and was separated from the rest of her family by the time she was 11. She experimented with drugs in her teenage years and eventually discovered crack. She married and had a child at 18, but the union later ended in divorce. Things began to spiral out of control for Ms. Cain in 1989, which is when she wound up homeless. She became a prostitute and was in and out of jail on charges, including drug possession, theft, assault and robbery. Aside from prostitution, she learned a variety of ways to fund her habit. In 1995, police said Ms. Cain solicited rides from two different women and stole one woman's purse and took money off the dashboard of another woman's car. In between her sporadic lockups, she gave birth to three other children, who were all placed in foster care and later adopted. Her ex-husband raised her oldest son. Ms. Cain was pregnant with her fifth child and imprisoned in 2004 when she learned about Tamar Inc., which helped recently paroled women raise their children. At the time, her worse fear was that she would lose another child because of her lifestyle, so she did what she could to get enrolled. That required asking a judge to add two years to her sentence so that she could get her medical care at Tamar's Baltimore office. Orlandra was born in August 2004 and Ms. Cain was paroled into Tamar's program. She lived in their residential facility in Baltimore with her baby while receiving therapy and learning how best to care for her daughter. After 6 months, she received a grant for housing in Baltimore County. She graduated from the program after a year and continued to do volunteer work helping other mothers get adjusted. She was hired in October of last year. One of the toughest and most beneficial parts of the treatment was the therapy sessions, Ms. Cain said. "I grieved every child I lost because of my addiction," Ms. Cain said. "I allowed myself to see that they were living a better life than they would have with me on the streets. I grieved losing me to prostitution and being homeless. "It's painful, but it's a pain I can endure. Losing my children was a traumatic experience and I had to deal with that." When Ms. Cain is in Annapolis now, she visits her family in the Clay Street community. She also distributes her business card to other struggling addicts. Longtime resident Philip Coleman has seen Ms. Cain making her rounds. He, too, has tried helping addicts clean up their acts, but has had little success. "She's been around quite a bit," Mr. Coleman said. "Whenever you see someone straighten themselves up and get off drugs, that's a good thing. The drugs don't do anything but tear you down. (The drugs) bring you down to nothing and that's a hard thing." Rev. Hulan Marshall said more people like Ms. Cain are needed in the city. He runs Noah's Ark on Clay Street, which provides substance abuse treatment. "Those are the best people that can help you because they know what you're going through and they know what the triggers are," he said. "They're the best person that come along and give you encouragement because they've been there before. They talked the talk, walked the walk and turned it around."

Published 11/10/06, Copyright © 2006 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.

A county Detention Center inmate who summoned an ambulance for her sick cellmate is spending 10 days in ``the hole`` for telephone misuse. Tonier Cain, 21, doesn`t think she misused the phone or deserves solitary confinement in a lockdown cell. Ms. Cain claims that the medical staff at the Detention Center ignored inmate Debra Evans` complaints, so she took matters into her own hands. Ms. Evans, who has a history of kidney problems, said she was sick with a fever, elevated blood pressure and back and abdominal pains. She was moved to the infirmary two hours after the call. Guards drove her to the hospital for tests the next day, a Detention Center official confirmed, but the results are not yet available. ``I just can`t believe they would punish me for that. There was nothing else for us to do,`` said Ms. Cain, who is being held on bad check charges. Jail Supt. Richard Baker said the sick inmate`s treatment two hours later had nothing to do with the 911 call. ``I`m not going to allow inmates to be calling ambulances when they want to play medical professionals, which they`re not,`` he said. ``{Ms. Evans} was already being treated for the complaint she had. Specifically, the nurses were asked, `Does this woman need to go to the hospital?` and the answer was no.`` When the medical staff`s shift changed at 11 p.m., a medical decision was made to move Ms. Evans to the infirmary, Baker said. Medical care at the jail, which holds about 500 inmates, has been criticized in recent weeks by a county grand jury, the guards` union and inmates. Services are provided by Correction Medical Services Inc., a Missouri corporation, for an $825,000 annual fee. The incident occurred Sept. 14 about 9 p.m. as Ms. Evans lay on her cellblock bed, writhing in pain and barely conscious, according to Ms. Cain. When nurse Eleanor Randall came to the dorm and distributed medication through the cell bars, three inmates carried Ms. Evans to the bars because she could not walk, Ms. Evans said. At the inmates` request, Ms. Randall returned and entered the cellblock. The licensed practical nurse took Ms. Evans` blood pressure, but said there wasn`t anything she could do because Ms. Evans wasn`t sick enough to go to the hospital, Ms. Evans and Ms. Cain said. So Ms. Cain called her brother, who made a conference call to emergency 911. An ambulance arrived at the jail, but guards turned it away, she said. About 11 p.m., two hours after the call, another nurse ordered Ms. Evans transferred to the jail infirmary, Baker said. The next day, she went to the hospital for tests, but returned to the infirmary. Guards transferred her back to the dorm Monday. Meanwhile, Ms. Cain was told the punishment for her ``infraction`` would be 10 days in solitary. She began serving it Friday. ``Debra`s face, legs and stomach were swollen. Her eyes were shut tight. She was very sick,`` Ms. Cain said. ``I just can`t believe that they would punish me for that. There was nothing else to do. The lieutenant wouldn`t come down.`` She`s glad Ms. Evans is feeling better, however. ``If it took for me to get punished like I am to get a nurse down here to see her, then it was worth it,`` she said.

Published 9/22/1989, Copyright © 1989 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.