Government Law
Overseer Moves to Seize $8B in California Funds for Prison Health Care
Posted Aug 14, 2008, 08:02 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A court-appointed overseer for health care in California prisons has asked a federal judge to turn over $8 billion in state funds.
J. Clark Kelso said the money is needed to meet minimum constitutional standards for prison health care, the Los Angeles Times reports. He said U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson should order officials to give him the money and issue contempt citations for both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Controller John Chiang.
Kelso is also seeking $2 million a day in fines for each day that payment is delayed, the Daily Journal reports (sub. req.).
State officials claim they need legislative authorization before they can act. Schwarzenegger sought $7 billion for Kelso’s reform plan in his state budget but the request was blocked by the legislature.
Kelso’s request comes as the state scrambles to cope with a $15.2 billion budget deficit.
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Posted by rich mckone - 3 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 23 hours, 56 minutes ago
A few facts about the California Correctional System:
1. California’s total correctional incarceration rate is about average nationally when the county jail incarceration rate is added to the prison population. California is comparatively high on the prison incarceration rate and low on the jail incarceration rate.
2. The State could eliminate the 16,600 prison bed shortage by releasing Requests for Proposals (RFP) to house short term, low risk offenders and technical parole violators occupying prison beds and avoid spending any money for construction.
3. Operational costs for local correctional beds are about 10% to 20% lower than prison operating costs. If RFP’s for correctional beds were awarded, the State would realize a “profit” of about $250 million to $350 million in reduced annual correctional bed operating costs. Only about 4% of the California prison population is held in contract facilities compared to 9% in Texas and 6% in Florida.
4. The long term, county jail bed shortage, approaching about 100,000 beds, resulted in the shift of parole violators and short term offenders to prison, About 90,000 short term offenders who should be serving their terms in county jails now occupy about 38,000 State prison beds, causing prison overcrowding.
5. Prior to the jail bed shortage, there was a 50%/50% state/local correctional population split. Currently, there is a 67% state, 33% county split.
6. The $6.5 billion, 40,000-prison-bed construction package will add capacity for about 70,000 or so prison inmates, and result in a 20,000+-prison-bed surplus.
7. Availability of local correctional beds to house technical parole violators awaiting revocation action would also result in annual savings of about $.5 billion in prison operating costs.
Politics, rather than standard correctional system analysis, is the only basis for AB 900. Without a statewide correctional planning and coordinating agency, as the Board of Corrections was originally intended, California is pretty much doomed to have a very expensive and inefficient system.