By Don Thompson
Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown has likened it to the “Sword of Damocles,” the sense of foreboding and uncertainty that has hung over California government since the federal courts assumed control over the state’s massive prison medical operations.
Most of the prison system’s core functions, from the care of mentally ill inmates to housing juvenile offenders, have been under the authority of federal and state courts for years. But the state appears to be emerging from more than a decade of lawsuits after a federal judge said recently he is preparing to end court oversight of inmate medical care.
That has the potential to end a long-running battle between the state and federal courts that led to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge and a revamping of the nation’s largest state prison system.
Reforming that part of prison operations has cost California billions of dollars and led critics to say it created a system that provides convicts with better health care than many of the taxpayers who are paying to house them. State spending on inmate health care and related costs doubled to a peak of $16,565 annually for each inmate in the first five years after U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco seized control of the prison medical system.
He appointed a federal receiver to run it in 2006 after finding that an average of one inmate per week was dying of neglect or malpractice.
The receiver boosted salaries for doctors and other prison health care providers while ordering billions of dollars’ worth of renovations at prison medical facilities, culminating in a $906 million prison medical center being built south of the state capital.
Since then, the number of clearly avoidable inmate deaths has fallen and an independent inspector is giving better reviews to prison medical facilities, receiver J. Clark Kelso reported to Henderson last week.
“Significant progress has been made,” Henderson wrote in ordering state officials and inmates’ attorneys to begin preparing to end the receivership, with a report due by April 30. “While some critical work remains outstanding — most notably on construction issues — it is clear that many of the goals of the Receivership have been accomplished.”
Brown acknowledged Wednesday that California’s prisons have been “a big mess” but said the judge recognizes the vast improvement in health care there.
“In fact, I would say the health care is the best anywhere, any prison in the world, and better than many, many communities, even in California,” Brown told reporters in Burbank.
Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which brought the lawsuit, said conditions still are inadequate.
He said questions remain about what standards the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation must meet to be providing constitutionally adequate care.
Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, a longtime critic of the receivership, said there will need to be long-term independent monitoring of the prison system even if the receiver turns control back to the state, “to make sure we don’t get in this mess again.”
Yet there are signs that judicial oversight may be easing.
The same federal judge last March ended another legal case that had lasted more than two decades after he agreed the corrections department had made sufficient reforms to protect inmates from being abused by guards.
The state also has spent hundreds of millions of dollars adding mental health treatment facilities and hiring treatment professionals as it tries to end another federal lawsuit, this one alleging years of poor treatment of mentally ill inmates.
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