Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Governing Through Crime

Criminal Law

: Governing Through Crime

From Humanity to Health: Why Can't California Get Prison Healthcare Right?

By Jonathan Simor

Yesterday to no doubt considerable embarrassment in the Brown-Beard administration, admissions to California's newest prison near Stockton California, were halted by the court appointed health care receiver, law professor Clark Kelso.  The prison, the first new facility in a decade, is the lynch-pin of the administration's frequent claim to have gotten on top of California's decades old prison health care crisis.  The prison is the first of its kind to be purpose built to house and care for many of the state's seriously ill prisoners whose suffering in the grip the state's chronic overcrowding led the Supreme Court to describe the state's system as unfit for a civilized society in Brown v. Plata (2011).  Under pressure to show that it can make progress in reducing that overcrowding, the administration is no doubt frustrated to have to halt adding inmates to the facility intended to hold nearly 1800 prisoners at full capacity, but Receiver Kelso's order and the report accompanied it raises more basic questions as to whether the State has yet drawn any lessons from its decades of human rights abuses about what it takes to operate prisons that respect human dignity as required by the Constitution (as well international human rights conventions to which the state is answerable through the courts of the United States)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on February 06, 2014 (boomark / email).