Before seeing this morning's headline, "SBI probes hospital sex report," I had no idea there even was a Dix inmate labor program.

Thank heavens after sex between prisoners and Dix employees, the Department of Corrections is going to re-evaluate that program.

Getting rid of it would, of course, be far too harsh, since we all know doctors, nurses, orderlies and strangers off the street are having sex around every corner in just about every public and private hospital in the U.S.

Oops! Sorry! There I go confusing "Gray's Anatomy" with real life again.

Telling it straight: what an abomination. I'm sure prisoners working in the state hospital system is the status quo. After all, they work on our state's transportation system, and I'm sure there's been money saved. But then, there's a BIG difference between highways and people, sick people.

Given the greatest assurance that no harm would come to a patient (that assurance virtually impossible in light of what has just occurred), it is still simply the principal of the matter, the ingrained concept that this is OK. It says to state psychiatric  patients: "You're less. If you had money, you wouldn't be here. If you had a physical illness other than a biologically-based brain disorder, you wouldn't be here. Inmates wouldn't be here.

"You're part of the system, the roads are part of the system, the inmates are part of the system. It's all right. It's family."

Maybe you say, "David, you're making too much of this." But to me, such things are the tiny cracks in our common concept of dignity that we can either point out or ignore. And as we all know, cracks left unattended, grow larger in time.

I wish inmate's responsibilities at Dix had been defined. But whether trimming hedges or flipping pancakes, the story is in a way a fitting analogy of two groups, prisoners and those with mental illness, that are increasingly being morphed into one time and time again in jails across the nation.

Until inmates are routintely working at Baptist in Winston, the Duke and UNC hospital systems, Mission in Asheville, and our state's other hospitals, it's a smack in the face of those patients with a mental illness that state psychiatric hospitals would be party to inmate labor programs.

But then again, that's just the way the system works.

David Cornwell
Executive Director
North Carolina Mental Hope