You gotta read this, Debra Saunders' look at how unelected bureaucrats from the California courts have thrown common sense, financial responsibility and even citizen safety into the dumpster in order to get incarcerated criminals 3 times the medical care that the average Californian does. And they're not stopping there. No, on the new agenda are beautician services, music therapy, early outs and more.You can't make this stuff up.
A panel of three federal judges is holding a trial to determine whether to free 52,000 of California's 172,000 prison inmates to alleviate overcrowding. You might be asking yourself: Who elected these guys to run California?
One of the three judges, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, determined in 2005 that California's prison health care system is so bad that it's unconstitutional. He put the system in receivership and appointed law professor Clark Kelso to oversee prison health care.
Now Kelso is demanding $8 billion to renovate the system -- even though the state is spending about $14,000 on health care per inmate, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. (California's total health care spending was $169 billion in 2006, the California Medical Association's Ned Wigglesworth told me, which divided by 37 million comes to about $4,600 per head -- or a third of what is spent on the incarcerated.)
Here's the unfunny funny part: Criminal Justice Legal Foundation President Michael Rushford recently figured out that inmates live longer on the inside than on the outside, and they live longer on the inside than outsiders live. He found a study, "Release from Prison -- A High Risk of Death for Former Inmates," published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, which shows that the mortality rate for Washington state inmates spiked more than 1,200 percent in the first two weeks after their release, and averaged 386 percent higher than inmates in prison during the two years after release...
Apparently prison -- even prisons with shabby health facilities -- provides a healthier environment than what most criminals are used to. Behind bars, there are fewer ways to be self-destructive -- and there's health care...
These improvements are not good enough for Kelso. As the Sacramento Bee reported earlier this year, Kelso had been working on a plan for health care facilities with art therapists, music therapists and beauticians -- at an annual cost of $230,000 per inmate, according to a corrections agency draft.
Other problems, the Bee noted, were plans to build facilities with "proximity to urban areas, in several cases, backing up to neighboring homes and schools," in a "mall-based environment" with unlocked rooms that would allow male and female inmates to mix.
Does Kelso understand that 47 percent of the California prison population are repeat violent offenders, 33 percent are repeat offenders and many of the rest are first-time felons who committed serious crimes against people, like rape and murder?...
