Recent testimony in a prisoner's class action (Plata v. Schwarzenegger Col1351) complaining about poor medical care is to be read to believe.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson made it clear in may that he's so fed up with the state's slow progress on fixing the prisons' "horrifying" medical system that he's ready to appoint an outside receiver to take over.
How can a system that spends $1.1 billion per year be so bad? A Chicago-based osteopath originally hired as a consultant by the Department of Corrections, was called to the stand to describe his review of 200 inmate deaths in California prisons in recent years. He testified that at least 34 deaths were potentially preventable and that he might have reached the same conclusion about 65 other deaths except that shoddy record keeping by prison officials made a thorough review impossible. He also testified that supervising medical officials in the state's prisons routinely fail to investigate deaths and sometimes ignore malpractice committed by staff doctors.
The judge asked whether the main problem is in competency or indifference. Answer: it's a combination of both, and he added that in some cases "we saw extreme indifference to the point of callousness."
Source: Los Angeles Daily Journal, June 1, 2005. www.dailyjournal.com
- a California prisoner, October 2005