Conditions at San Quentin State Prison are so appallingly bad that it is dangerous to house new and sick inmates there, a team of medical experts reported to a federal judge last week.
Worse, the prison administration has had a year to comply with a court order requiring improvements in medical care, yet compliance was "nonexistent," the team reported. The report was obtained by The Associated Press in advance of a Senate committee hearing Thursday on health care within the troubled Department of Corrections.
"We found a facility so old, antiquated, dirty, poorly staffed, poorly maintained, with inadequate medical space and equipment and overcrowded that it is our opinion that it is dangerous to house people there with certain medical conditions and is also dangerous to use this facility as an intake facility," the four national experts reported Friday. "In summary, San Quentin should be viewed as needing to start from the beginning."
Youth and Adult Correctional Secretary Roderick Hickman and other top corrections officials met with the experts and U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson on Wednesday to go over the report. Spokesmen for Hickman and the Department of Corrections said they "are working with the courts to comply with the experts' concerns."
Yet the historic San Francisco prison that houses California's death row has had more than a year to comply without apparent results, the two doctors and two nurses found in a series of inspections in January and February.
Moreover, health care there passed federal court muster less than 10 years ago when a previous court oversight order was withdrawn, meaning conditions have deteriorated significantly, they found. The prison was formerly run by Corrections Director Jeanne Woodford, who was warden there from 1999 until her appointment by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a year ago.
The report is the first on the prison system's compliance with last year's court settlement, yet the experts found that "overall compliance ... was nonexistent."
Officials have periodically proposed closing the 153-year-old prison that sits on prime waterfront property along San Francisco Bay. But attempts to move the state's condemned unit elsewhere have run into opposition, and the department now plans a $220 million new death row at San Quentin. A final environmental impact report on the planned expansion is due Friday.
Scott Peterson, convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and the fetus she carried, is in San Quentin's intake unit awaiting his transfer to death row.