The prisoners here at Corcoran are deprived of adequate medical and mental health care. The medical policy is that once you turn in a health care service form you are supposed to have a face to face interview with the nurse. But here it takes prisoners 2 to 3 weeks to see a physician. We have mentally ill prisoners banging and screaming all night because they are not receiving proper mental health care.
The law library is wholly inadequate, they have no paging system, and 10 cages in the law library with 4 buildings of prisoners to service. Most of the time they don't have the law books you need to look up a case, or pages are torn out of it because they do not allow prisoners to copy cases and the prisoner access to the law library is limited. They have one librarian who is inexperienced and most of the time she brings you the wrong law books.
Staff refuse to use the hot cart to heat the prisoner's meals, instead they put sheets over the hot carts so that they do not have to clean it afterwards. Then on linen day we are only able to exchange one sheet.
In March staff deliberately set two prisoners up to assault one another. They let one prisoner out for medical and while he was waiting for escort they let another prisoner of a different race out and then the guard never pressed his alarm. When the escort came they saw the two prisoners and pressed their alarm. They kept fighting so the sergeant ordered the officer in the control to fire the block.
- a ca prisoner, April 2006