Yesterday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced they they were cutting off all visits to inmates at each of their 33 prisons plus their six youth facilities due to the the swine flu outbreak.
When I first got the email from the office of the Receiver for California Prison Health Care Services, the guy who oversees the CDCR’s health system, I assumed the worst.
With our drastically overcrowded state prisons, a flu outbreak could lead to the critical mass explosion that has so worried world health officials. So perhaps there was the start of such an outbreak in the prison system?
Well, no.
Turns out that one guy at Centinela State Prison in Imperial County is being tested for swine flu. He may or may not have it. His symptoms are mild. Nonetheless the CDCR folks have isolated him and his cellmate from the rest of the population.
Okay, sounds smart.
And, just to be on the safe side, corrections officials decided it would be prudent to shut down all “nonessential” visits to Centinela until the fluish patient can be adequately tested, and we know what we’re dealing with here. (Nonessential, meaning attorneys can still come in.)
Good. Better safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, the CDCR didn’t stop there. It shut down Centinela—and then shut down all visits to the other 32 prisons (and six juvenile facilities). Until further notice.
I asked Luis Patino, the spokesman for the federal receiver, if this didn’t feel like a something of a kill-the-mosquito with the H-bomb approach.
He said he’d have more on this later in the day.
In the meantime I emailed my friend, David-the-former-prison-warden and asked him.
“There seems to be a gross over reaction to the H1N1 virus,” he wrote back. “I’m afraid ‘shutting down’ is a patented CDCR response to all kinds of situations.”
So it seems.
Just after that, I got a call from an inmate at Ironwood state prison. He called for an unrelated reason, then in the course of the conversation told me that prisoners were refusing to eat at all because they found out that the packaged food meal they were being served (the same food they had been given one day the week before) had a sell-by date of 2007.
Yeah. That’s how you protect the health of your inmates.
The folks at the federal monitor’s office promised to check on the Ironwood/sell-by date issue too.
Back when I’ve got more.
This whole flu business isn’t an “overreaction.” That’s right, I said it.
Instead, it’s a trumped-up crisis to provide cover and give a reason for Obama to grow government even more, with the blessings of the liberal media and the resulting panic of a scared public who think that government is the only thing to protect them.
Woody… you old conspiracy buff, you. Hey check out
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
http://www.prisonplanet.com/
http://www.infowars.com/
It’s not a “conspiracy.” It’s a tactical move by Obama, just like his taking over the banks and getting urgent passage of the break-the-bank stimulus package that “we have to have now!!,” but that wasn’t needed then and that we don’t need today, since Obama says that we are pulling out of the recession without it. Obama intentionally and unnecessarily alarms the public to increase his power.
Did you call Hillary Clinton a conspiracy buff when she cried about “the vast right wing conspiracy?”
If you like conspiracies, here’s a real one: The new left-wing conspiracy
It seems to me you forget who started this handing out of government (our) money it started with George W Bush. People started throwing fits about how the money was being spent; big bonuses, parties, airplanes, ect… Big business is actually who runs things, or if you really want to break it down 1% of the population runs the rest of us around. That’s been the theory I’ve heard since I was a little kid. What difference does it make anyway, most things don’t change our everyday lives. One thing that really is a big problem is global warming. Which is causing shortages of water and food around the world, cause buddy these things will change our everyday lives, as the shortage gets bigger by the year. In the U.S. alone we have over used our water in Nebraska, New Mexico, just to name two places where a large body of underground water is found. What happens when the underground lake in Nebraska is gone? Shit reality can be bad enough Left and right wing crap is just to keep your mind off the real problems.