Free Republic

A recent Wall Street Journal article on how states are reducing their prison costs was illustrated with a photo of inmates being housed cheek-by-jowl in a California prison gymnasium. The article was also illustrated with a chart detailing how 31 states were reducing their prison spending. But California was not on the list for a very simple reason: It is not reducing prison spending, even though the number of its inmates is slowly declining. Gov. Jerry Brown's 2011-12 budget makes sharp reductions in spending on health and welfare services and higher education – permanent ones, he says – but would...

Chairmen of two California legislative committees, responding to a recent Bee investigation, said this week that they would probe prison health care staffing as managed by receiver J. Clark Kelso, who operates under a federal court order. The Bee reported that the prisons last year spent more than $152 million on temporary clinical employees, such as doctors and nurses. Another $170 million went to overtime for clinicians and guards who accompany inmates to appointments. Some nurses work such long hours that they fall asleep on the job, workers and executives said. Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate, who chairs...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The lawyer representing California in a lawsuit over prison health care said today that state officials aren't ready to comply with a federal judge's order to turn over $250 million for new hospitals for inmates, despite the possibility of a contempt-of-court order against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered Schwarzenegger and state Controller John Chiang on Oct. 8 to tell him how soon they would provide the money, the first installment in an $8 billion construction plan that a court-appointed manager drew up to raise the prison health system to constitutional standards. Henderson said...

SACRAMENTO - Declaring the state's $1 billion-a-year prison health system "horrifying," a federal judge Tuesday threatened to strip the Schwarzenegger administration of control of inmate care and put it in the hands of a receiver. Noting that the administration inherited many of the deficiencies, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson nonetheless cited "the problem of a highly dysfunctional, largely decrepit, overly bureaucratic and politically driven prison system" that "is too far gone to be corrected by conventional methods." Henderson, who has been overseeing the settlement of a 2001 inmate lawsuit, set two weeks of court hearings starting May 31 for the...