The SF Examiner just ran an article that characterizes the new construction requested by the draft report for the court-appointed receiver tasked with overhauling the state’s prison health care system as loaded with “plush” “amenities.”

They may be right.

Or not.

(For the back story on this issue see these posts.)

Here’s the relevant clip:

The recommendations called on the cash-starved state to spend $8 billion on seven new hospitals – each roughly the size of 10 Wal-Mart stores – to replace a decrepit health care system that a federal judge says is killing an average of one inmate per week. Judge Thelton Henderson said state officials were incapable of fixing the system and handed the job to receiver Clark Kelso.

The draft report, posted recently on the receiver’s Web site, said the new hospitals’ environment “should be ‘holistic’ in expression.”

“In the place of sterile prison corridors or barren, large-scale ‘yards,’ both staff and patient should experience landscaped courtyards and places of rest and respite,” the draft said.

The report also suggested that the new prison hospitals include:

– Workout rooms to “promote wellness,” featuring exercise machines and space for “therapeutic activities such as aerobics, yoga, (and) group exercise.” Plus handball courts.

– Outdoor courtyards “where patients will be encouraged to participate in recreational therapy programs such as horticulture.”

– Gymnasiums with a basketball court and a music room, a crafts room, game room and therapy kitchen.

– Outdoor running tracks.

The report also said there should be day rooms for patients featuring a “quiet room for reading and study, as well as a separate room for group TV watching.” Each should include “a liberal use of sound attenuation materials and be designed to maximize natural light to create a normative environment,” the document said.

Those representing Kelso, the federal receiver, say that this is an old draft of the report and that most of the kerfuffle is about mental health treatments that are already required by the courts.

The office of State Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is furious at the whole thing and tried to block it in court, sent the article around to interested press persons, myself included, with an “IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS” note.

From my chilly perch in the wilds of Vermont, I can’t readily tell you if the critics and the SF reporters are shooting at straw men with this howl over “plush prison hospitals,” or whether the requests from Kelso are indeed absurdly excessive.

But I do know two things:

ONE: the state’s prison health care system cannot continue to offer unconstitutional treatment (or lack thereof) that routinely kills an inmate a week. Sorry. That’s how it is.

And TWO: The state is perilously close to broke.

All of which adds up to the fact that the supposed grown-ups in Sac’to need to stop sniping at each other and figure this puppy out.

Now.

On Tuesday night, CBS News announced the devastating results of a five-month investigation into the incidence of suicide among American war veterans. Until the CBS folks did their own count using existing state death records (that no one had bothered to gather together and analyze), little information existed about how many suicides among veterans there were nationwide.

The numbers CBS found are extremely disturbing. In 2005, 6256 veterans killed themselves—an average of 120 suicides each week. Furthermore, the CBS researchers found that veterans age 20-24 had the highest suicide rate of any age group. These, of course, are the Iraq and Afghani war kids. Whereas other veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide than the non-veteran populace. The new, young vets were three or four times more likely.

The examples CBS used to illustrate the problem, for me as a mother, were nearly unbearable to watch.

Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of this parents’ home – where his father, Kevin, found him.

“There’s a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way,” Kevin Lucey said.

Kim and Mike Bowman’s son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.

“His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn’t there anymore,” Kim Bowman said.

Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.

Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He died jumping off a bridge at 27.

Meanwhile, in related story reported in this morning’s LA Times, a new study was released on Wednesday showing that post-war emotional stress and depression caused by combat in Iraq often don’t appear until months after a soldier has returned home.

Overall, about 20 percent of active-duty soldiers and more than 40 percent of National Guardsmen and reservists were referred for care or had sought care on their own, a military team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Psychologists hope that catching incipient problems early and getting soldiers into treatment will prevent the type of long-term mental health problems that afflicted many soldiers who fought in Vietnam, said Dr. Charles S. Milliken of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who led the study.

Yes, but are we really catching things early—or at all?

The story excerpted below ran in the Texas Observer this summer. It’s a portrait of three different service people who have come back from Iraq, and it It suggests we aren’t doing quite so swimmingly at the Walter Reed guy would have us believe.

Read the rest of this entry »