A federal judge now will have to decide whether Calif. can “suddenly turn on a dime and walk away from six years of agreements.”
By Josh Richman
Oakland Tribune
OAKLAND, Calif. — California asked a federal judge Wednesday to end the receivership he created to remedy the state’s long-running failure to address the dysfunctional, deadly prison health care system.
State Attorney General Jerry Brown’s motion, announced by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his finance and corrections chiefs at a Capitol news conference, doesn’t claim the system’s problems which at their height led to an average of one preventable inmate death per week all have been solved.
Rather, the state argues that Receiver J. Clark Kelso is running rampant, exceeding his authority under federal law by trying to force the state to spend billions even while its cash reserves run dry due to the ongoing budget deadlock.
“By many measures, the Receivership has helped: In the last three years, significant improvements in prison health care have been achieved,” the motion acknowledges. “But in implementing these improvements, the Receiver failed to focus on the proper goal (ensuring that Defendants are no longer deliberately indifferent) or to do so in the proper manner (by the least intrusive means).
“Instead, the Receiver ignored these limits, and spent and continues to spend massive sums in an unaccountable manner to create one of the most expensive prison health care systems in the nation. The Receiver’s utopian system must now end.”
Kelso’s $8 billion construction plan must be scrapped, the motion argues, because the Prison Litigation Reform Act bars federal courts from ordering any prison construction, much less Kelso’s plan to build seven facilities by mid-2013 with 10,000 beds for chronically sick or mentally ill inmates, as well as improving existing facilities at the state’s 33 prisons.
“The prison health care system is not ready for a termination of the receivership,” Kelso replied at a news conference Wednesday, adding he believes he could wrap up his work and return control to the state in another three to four years.
For now, he said, the independent California Office of the Inspector General has agreed prison health care still doesn’t meet at least half the metrics required to bring up the system to constitutional snuff. These aren’t abstract measures, he added they’re firm standards of which the state still falls short.
The motion was filed today to Senior U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, but as it essentially asks the judge to overrule his own decisions of the past few years, it’s probably intended more for eventual consideration by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court already is considering whether Henderson overstepped his authority in October by threatening to hold Schwarzenegger and Controller John Chiang in contempt of court for refusing to make a $250 million down payment on the $8 billion project.
Henderson in 2005 found the state even since the 2002 settlement of a class-action lawsuit had failed to bring up prison health care to minimum constitutional requirements. In February 2006, he named Bob Sillen, formerly the Santa Clara Valley Health & Hospital System’s executive director, as a receiver in charge of reforming the system; Sillen assessed the broken system and began a series of successful reforms in areas such as doctor and nurse staffing and pharmacies.
Henderson replaced Sillen with Kelso a year ago, writing that the receivership’s next phase required a “different set of administrative skills and style of collaborative leadership.” Henderson approved Kelso’s construction plan in June.
Kelso said Wednesday the judge now will have to decide whether the state can “suddenly turn on a dime and walk away from six years of agreements.”
State Department of Finance Director Mike Genest said Wednesday that the receiver’s spending “would be alarming even in normal times,” but even the highest-priority programs are being cut back during the worst fiscal crisis in recent history.
Kelso contended he has held down costs during his tenure, while costs for inmate mental health and dental care of which the state retains control, not him have increased far more: “We are doing a better job of managing our costs than the health care disciplines over which CDCR has responsibility.”
Copyright 2009 Contra Costa Newspapers