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| California Settles Suit Over Prison Health Care |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 01/31/2002 |
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California officials have agreed to settle a huge class action lawsuit that alleged the state engages in 'cruel and unusual punishment' by denying adequate medical care to its 160,000 prison inmates. The deal, filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, commits the California Department of Corrections to implement a raft of health-care improvements over the next several years as well as allow an independent medical panel to audit the state's progress. 'The agreement calls for them to overhaul the medical system in a way that is sensible and will provide prisoners with a reasonable opportunity to get time,' said Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which filed the case. 'We are very happy with what we achieved.' The suit, which was filed last year, followed years of complaints about California's prison medical care system, which critics said was often lax in assessing the medical needs of sick prisoners. Among the named plaintiffs in the case was a prisoner with AIDS who said his pain medication was consistently interrupted and a paraplegic who said his urinary catheter was rarely changed, causing infections that required hospitalization. While activists in other states have targeted prison health care systems in the past, the California case marked the largest such class action suit ever filed against a statewide prison system, Specter said. 'This is a problem which is endemic in prisons in the modern age,' Specter said. 'But California is noteworthy because it is so big, and that makes it a lot harder to fix.' The suit charged that California authorities did not hire enough medical staff, delayed treatment and medical tests, did not adequately screen incoming inmates and lacked proper procedures for dealing with chronic illnesses such as AIDS or diabetes. Among the improvements the state agreed to in the settlement is a move to place registered nurses in each prison's emergency clinic 24 hours per day beginning Jan. 1, 2003. Prisoners are also expected to be assigned primary care physicians and the prison system will develop standardized protocols for medical treatments. Supervising Deputy California Attorney General John Appelbaum, who represented the Corrections Department in the case, said the state struck the deal to avoid protracted litigation. 'Our office feels this settlement is in the best interests of the state of California and the Corrections Department,' Appelbaum said. 'It is designed to ensure inmates constitutionally adequate medical care and it implements a comprehensive review and improvement of the prison medical system.' |
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