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| CA builds the nation's largest prison medical facility |
| By scpr.org - Julie Small |
| Published: 08/01/2012 |
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California is building the largest prison medical facility in the nation — and it’s doing it a record clip. That’s because the state has to comply with a federal court order to improve health care for inmates. A cluster of a warehouses, bungalows and two-story-high mounds of dirt mark the future home of the California Health Care Facility, just outside of Stockton. Even though the word “prison” isn’t in its name, the 144-acre facility definitely fits the description. That will be evident soon when the building contractor rings the perimeter with electrified fences and guard towers. The medical hub inside those fences is designed to provide long-term care to 1,700 inmates too sick to live in regular housing. Mike Meredith with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation manages the $900 million project. He says the scale and cost of the Stockton facility dwarfs any commercial project he’s worked on. There’s good reason for that. As he tours a mock-up of what the main housing will look like once it’s finished, Meredith explains the many aspects of the building designed to support recovery starting at the ceiling. “It would draw a lot of light down into the day area for patients, a lot of them with mental issues and/or a variety of clinical issues,” says Meredith. “It sort of helps promote healing them and, in theory, gets them back to the general population.” A series of cells runs on the outside walls down the length of a building. Eventually, nurses stations will be built in the middle of the corridor. Wider doorways let medical staff move inmates in and out of rooms on gurneys or in wheelchairs. The contractors wired the walls to support major medical equipment. Doing that requires more technology and more square footage than standard prison cells. Nancy Kincaid, the spokeswoman for the federal receiver in charge of prison medical care, says there's aren't enough ground level cells at other facilities for all the inmates who need them. “All the facilities out at the other institutions are all two levels, sometime three levels, and you don’t have elevators in housing areas,” she explains. “Because this is long-term care and an aging population, everything is one floor.” For years, Californians voted to lengthen prison sentences. That means more felons are behind bars well past the age when chronic disease develops. The federal receiver’s office says that more than half the state’s inmates — nearly 70,000 — get treatment for a chronic condition. The state is legally required to provide adequate medical and mental health care. It didn’t always do a good job at that. About a decade ago, when lawyers showed that an inmate a week was dying from lack of care, a federal judge seized control of prison medical care in California and appointed the receiver to improve it. Later, a federal court ordered the state to reduce its prison population to improve medical care. Read More. |
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He has blue eyes. Cold like steel. His legs are wide. Like tree trunks. And he has a shock of red hair, red, like the fires of hell. His antics were known from town to town as he was a droll card and often known as a droll farceur. Hamilton Lindley with his madcap pantaloon is a zany adventurer and a cavorter with a motley troupe of buffoons.
I wonder if Nurse Ratched will be there to do the lobotomies.
California is a slave to the Federal government by their own choice. The tenth amendment can be applied if they chose to block this tyranny. They could enact state statutes to nullify the health care law. They are enabling this federal mischief on purpose. I hope they are not looking for a bailout once the repercussions start and the boulder comes back on them. No democracy has ever succeeded once one forgets that the borrower is enslaving themselves to the lender. It is a principle of life and that law is universally set in stone.Justice Roberts is a turncoat and Bush was a progressive in conservative clothing. This is why the Supreme Court should not be making law from the bench. I wonder what floor of that facility will warehouse all the former sex offenders that live in the bushes in tents at the present time. I guess they need to vote with their feet once they get permission to leave East Berlin.