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| Overhaul of Calif. Prison Health System Delayed |
| By San Francisco Chronicle |
| Published: 11/07/2005 |
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A court-ordered takeover of California's dangerously mismanaged prison health care system could take months longer than expected despite a federal judge's insistence last summer that receivership was urgently needed to save lives. The judge, Thelton Henderson of federal district court in San Francisco, had insisted in a dramatic series of hearings that, because of inadequate medical care, inmates were dying needlessly at the rate of one every week or so, and he ordered immediate action. But the process has been more challenging than expected, several people involved in the search for a receiver said -- yet another sign of the extraordinary depth of the problems in the state's vast prison medical system. In effect, the court has abandoned its first plan, which was to seek suitable candidates through an informal process involving the judge, the state's lawyers and lawyers representing inmates, and it has hired a professional search firm, Korn Ferry International, stretching out the timetable. "We tried hard, but it was hopelessly amateurish," said Donald Specter, the executive director of the Prison Law Office, a public interest law group that filed the original class-action suit on behalf of inmates that produced the settlement mandating changes in the health care system. "Nobody we talked to had all the qualifications. The more we found out, the more questions we had." Because of the coming holiday season, formal interviews and selection under Korn Ferry might not begin until early 2006, and it could take a few months more for a receiver to actually take over if the person has to move to California or leave another job. That means it could be sometime in the spring before the system is being managed by the receiver -- a position that would hold enormous power to fill the system's paralyzing level of job vacancies, improve supervision and oversight and to repair and rebuild poor medical facilities in the prisons. State corrections officials have conceded that the system is in "extreme crisis," as Henderson put it, and they hope that a receiver, who would answer to the judge, not the state, could cut through dense layers of bureaucratic red tape to institute improvements. The receiver would have the power to order changes without concern for the cost, which the state would bear. "It's not as if there's one guy out there who could step forward and do this," said Bruce Slaving, general counsel of the state Corrections Department. "I think the judge got a good sense as we got into this of the magnitude and the scale of the job." Henderson has been scathing in his criticisms of the vast prison health care system, citing "horrifying" conditions, "abysmal" care, and outright cruelty and depravity in some instances. Several years ago he said that the system was so inadequate it violated inmates' constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The state failed to phase in court-mandated improvements, so the judge said on June 30 that he would seize control of the system, with a budget of $1.1 billion a year, and appoint a receiver. No court has appointed a receiver over a system on this scale -- California has about 165,000 inmates in 32 prisons, many of them suffering chronic illnesses. Earlier, the judge appointed a consultant to prepare a report outlining ideas for addressing two of the more serious problems in the system: a growing number of vacancies and poor systems for reviewing the deaths of inmates under medical care and serious injuries caused by the poor care. That consultant, John Hagar, is scheduled to deliver his report to the judge next week, but it is likely to include little more than proposals for action on just a few of the wide range of problems the prison medical system faces. Meanwhile, some of the problems are getting worse as officials wait for the receiver to take over. Vacancy rates -- already at critically high levels at many prisons for doctors, nurses and technicians -- are rising. A recent report by the Prison Law Office on the Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga (Fresno County) said the facility had but one functioning full-time staff doctor, when it was supposed to have six, for an inmate population of more than 5,000. |
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