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Judge says state needs to hire mental health workers for prisons
| Monday, Jul 31 2006 8:15 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Jul 31 2006 8:15 PM
The Schwarzenegger administration must ask state lawmakers for the money to hire hundreds of mental health workers for California's prison system, under a federal judge's order made public Monday.
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The order from U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton is the latest in a string of actions in which federal overseers are driving reforms in the state's troubled corrections department.
Separate lawsuits have placed federal courts in charge of much of the state's prison operations, including inmate safety, employee discipline and its inmate health care and mental health systems. A state court, meanwhile, is ordering reforms to the juvenile justice system.
Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance estimated that California needed to hire an additional 552 mental health employees, but the administration never asked the Legislature to approve funding for those hires, Karlton said in his decision. It orders the administration to seek that funding from the Legislature during a special legislative session in August that will focus on prison reforms.
The judge's order was filed Friday but made public Monday in a case that had been sealed since June 21.
"Inmates placed by the state of California in overcrowded and understaffed administration segregation units are killing themselves in unprecedented numbers, while the Department of Finance parses charts to impede the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's efforts to procure staffing to address the problem," Michael Keating, the special master appointed by Karlton to oversee mental health improvements, wrote in a report unsealed with the judge's order.
A record number of inmates committed suicide last year, many of them in the bleak isolation units used to punish those accused of violating prison rules. The corrections department reported 44 suicides last year, although officials said the cause could not be determined in some cases. That was up from 26 suicides in 2004 and exceeded the previous record of 36 deaths in 2003.
A 1991 class-action lawsuit led to the federal oversight of mentally ill prisoners. Plaintiffs' attorneys have argued the lawsuit also should cover conditions that led inmates to commit suicide.
They say those prisoners by definition had psychological problems, even if they were not receiving mental health treatment.
Keating wrote that the finance department didn't push to fund the mental health positions because no court had ordered the spending.
"The Department of Finance now has its court order," Keating wrote.
The decision not to seek funding was made last year by Acting Corrections Secretary James Tilton, who then worked in the finance department. He made that decision because corrections officials had not provided enough information to justify the extra hiring, said Molly Arnold, the finance department's chief counsel.
Prison officials couldn't say what employees it had or what it needed, she said.
"I believe (Keating) is expressing frustration with the fact that CDCR cannot justify what they need," Arnold said.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Elaine Jennings said the department will work with finance officials and state legislators to get the money it had requested. Neither department could immediately say how much it will cost to hire so many new state employees.
"Hopefully, the Legislature will do its part," said Michael Bien, an attorney representing tens of thousands of mentally ill inmates in the class-action lawsuit. "It's an important step forward. It's a big chunk of the mental health staff that are necessary."
Karlton's order comes after another one he issued in April to spend more than $600 million to improve mental health services. That would include building new hospitals with space for 695 mentally ill inmates.