Last week Attorney General Jerry Brown accused the state prisons receiver of designing “gold-plated utopias” for California’s sickly inmates.
Today the receiver, J. Clark Kelso, shot back, providing reporters with photographs of the state’s California State Hospital, a facility for violent sexual offenders opened during the Schwarzenegger administration that he contends is the very Club Med for convicts that Brown loathes. That's a "socialization courtyard" at left.
The photos, available on the Department of Mental Health’s Web site, tout the prison’s “state of the art gym,” where inmates can play “badminton, basketball and volleyball” on a rubberized floor. There’s also a “patient mall” decorated in bright colors, a baseball courtyard, eight landscaped atriums, two chapels and a sweat lodge.
“A picture speaks a thousand volumes here,” Kelso said. The governor and Brown, he continued, “are criticizing their own treatment programs.”
Who do we have to hold up to get into this paradise? — after the jump.
Brown and Schwarzenegger blasted Kelso last week for including seeming luxuries like yoga rooms and landscaped courtyards in his multi-billion dollar plans for seven new inmate medical facilities. The state has asked a federal judge to can Kelso and return the prisons to the Department of Corrections' control.
Kelso said today that no one forced him to include the recreational areas in his plans but that he did so “to reflect best state thinking about treating mental health” needs of inmates.
“I don’t believe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t believe it’s gold-plated treatment,” Kelso said.
And then the receiver issued this threat: If the state doesn’t like his plans for mentally ill inmates, he’ll drop them and treat just the physically sick convicts. Kelso said he’s only obligated by a federal judge to improve medical treatment in the prisons and that he only took on care for mental health patients “as an accommodation to the governor.”
The state is being sued by inmates for inadequacies in both types of care.
A governor’s spokesman said this morning that he would have no immediate comment on Kelso’s claims.
— Cheryl Miller
Let’s set aside the question of Kelso's health care plan and look at how we got
into this mess in the first place... The politicians and people of California created it by foolishly thinking that they could punish crime away -- without giving any consideration to the ultimate cost and impossibility of such a plan.
With rehabilitation almost nonexistent – the public and politicians never
wanted to pay for that – recidivism remains at more than 66 percent. Two
out of every three people released from California prisons go back – the
highest rate in the nation. Politicians and the public thought they could
scrimp on health care, drug treatment, rehabilitation, education –
anything that might benefit the lives of inmates once they were released
because, well, they’re inmates and they deserve only the worst. Only 7
percent of inmates receive alcohol treatment, although 42 percent have a
high need for it. And only 2.5 percent of inmates who have a serious need
for drug treatment actually get it. And even for those who get treatment
in prison, aftercare programs when they’re on parole are wholly
inadequate.
The fact is that inmates are wards of the state and the people of the
state are responsible for their welfare – all 172,000 of them. The people
of California have volunteered to take care of as many inmates as
possible, and now they're complaining about the cost. Maybe Californians
should have thought of that before they embarked on their prison-building
binge while incarcerating as many people as possible. Since 1977, about
1,000 laws have been passed increasing penalties for all sorts of crimes.
California politicians run for office by touting how they got tough on
crime by increasing prison sentences. And the public eats it up.
http://tinyurl.com/CaliforniaPrisons
Posted by: jgogek | February 03, 2009 at 10:58 PM