Yesterday U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson made it clear to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Controller John Chiang, that in a ruling due later this week, he was going to order them to fork over $8 billion for seven new inmate medical facilities. The first installment on that $8 billion will be $250 million dollars.
(Henderson could have held Arnold and Controller Chiang in contempt because they have failed to turn over the requested bucks earlier.)
Of course, there is that one pesky little problem about California not having the money Henderson has demanded.
How bad are things? Unemployment is blowing through the roof. And state lawmakers are about to be called into an emergency session to slash the just-passed budget further.
“We need to act immediately,” said Controller Chaing yesterday.
Put another way, we’re the world’s seventh largest economy and we may need a loan from Washington to meet the state payroll.
Yet, still we have this prison problem.
Here’s how the San Jose Mercury News reports the issue:
Medical care in California’s prisons is so bad it has been ruled unconstitutional. Henderson appointed a receiver to run the prison medical system after finding that an average of an inmate a week was dying from neglect or malpractice.
[SNIP]
Deputy Attorney General Daniel Powell said the administration believes it needs a specific court order if it is to bypass the Legislature and turn over the money.
“I can do that by lunchtime,” Henderson interrupted.
Of course, we might not be having this discussion if the governor and the legislature had seen fit to work on SENTENCING REFORM and PAROLE REFORM several years ago. Or if they had allocated some resources to prisoner reentry, helping those getting out to become wage-earning tax-payers, instead of joining the revolving-door club.
Then perhaps we would no longer have a 71-percent recidivism rate and a ridiculously over-crowded, brutal—and very expensive— prison system that is so badly run that Federal Judges feel they have no choice but to step in to demand money from our already broke state.
(Go here for plenty of back story on the issue.)
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PS: While we’re on the subject of needed reform, here’s a new paper from the San Franciso Law Review about the sheer insanity of this nation’s policy of sentencing children to life in prison.
For juveniles, says the paper, life without the possibility of release or parole (LWOP) has “no deterrent value, contradicts our modern understanding that children have enormous potential for growth and maturity in passing from youth to adulthood, prevents society from ever reconsidering a child’s sentence, and denies the widely held expert view that children are amenable to rehabilitation and redemption.”
Oh, yeah, the U.S. is the only country in the world that continues the policy.
If we need reform, it’s court reform. That judge is nuts. He’s like the judge who ordered Kansas City to raise taxes to fund education waste that he created. Guess who appointed him…Jimmy Carter. I guess this is one more ruling of Henderson’s that will be overturned, as was this one.
This judge is hardly crazy.
Of course health care for prisoners is hardly a popular subject especially when law abiding working citizens can’t even afford medical care but we are a state and a country that requires that inmates be given a certain level of treatment. Unfortunately for Californians, 5 months ago when Republicans once again blocked the prison healthcare funds they were warned that the result may be that the courts would then force the state to pay this money. The bill has indeed come due.
This isn’t the work of an activist judge. California’s prison system is abysmal, failing and in desperate need of reform (gratuitously tacking “and Rehabilitation” at the end of the California Department of Corrections somehow did nothing.)
Although our baser moral inclinations may not care about suffering prisoners, luckily our Constitution does.
The judge is crazy when he wants money to appear that doesn’t exist. Maybe no one has noticed the cash problem of California. But, the state could sell Topnaga State Park and use that money for prisoner health care.