{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Justice Impact Show","title":"Held Hostage Friday. Back at Work Monday. Dr. Karen Gedney's 30 Years Behind Bars","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3281,"description":"In 1987, Karen Gedney walked up to the gatehouse at Northern Nevada Correctional Center to start her first job out of residency. The officer told her he'd never heard of her. Inside, the nurse said she was too busy and handed her off to a man in scrubs — who turned out to be an inmate, not staff. Two weeks later, the medical director who had hired her was dead of metastatic cancer, and Gedney, in her early thirties, was the only physician in the northern half of the Nevada prison system with nobody above her to ask.\nShe stayed thirty years.\n\nIn this conversation with JP Maroney, Dr. Gedney describes what she calls the two worlds inside every prison — the custody world, organized entirely around security, and the medical world, organized around the sickest, most addicted, most traumatized, and most dying people in the building. Her formulation of the difference is the sharpest line in the episode: \"They're constantly looking for you to do something wrong. I'm constantly looking for them to do something right.\"\n\nShe talks about the men who couldn't read well enough to spell \"hemorrhoids\" on the request form required to see a doctor, and the night classes she volunteered to teach after full workdays. She talks about being investigated by the Inspector General's office in her first months on a complaint that she favored Black inmates because her husband was Black — filed, she says, by a director of nursing married to an associate warden, in a system she describes as deeply nepotistic at the time.\n\nAnd she talks about October 13, 1989, when a patient serving life without parole took her hostage in the infirmary for roughly ten hours. She was assaulted and raped. A tactical team ended it with a concussion grenade and killed him a few feet from her. She went back to work Monday. Not one custody officer spoke to her. The inmates sent cards — every lifer on the yard signed one.\n\nThe second half turns to what she watched from the intake center: men released, then returned...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/nhl0jt9yc9bMTB_w4VRpw7Z_uzhEePkeYKE_stSpF8g/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82MTA0/ZTY5NzVmYzAxZTk2/YTUwMTcwYTBlMTAx/MDM4Yi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}