I was finally able to read through the Supreme Court opinion about California prison overcrowding last night. I highly encourage anyone interested in prison issues to read through it. You don’t have to be a lawyer or law student to understand the opinion. It is written in an accessible way. In Forbes Magazine, Ben Kerschberg provides very good information about the conditions that the majority cited in support of its opinion. I was particularly interested in the following ethnographic information about the current conditions in the California prisons that were cited in the opinion:

Physical Illness

* A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist.
* A prisoner died of testicular cancer after prison doctors failed to do a work up for cancer for the prisoner, who was in pain for 17 months.
* Physically ill prisoners were held together in one prison in a 12-by 20-foot cage with up to 50 sick inmates for five hours.
* In Plata, the State conceded that deficiencies in prison medical care violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights. That’s a pretty profound concession.
* Overcrowding has increased the incidence of infectious disease and has led to rising prison violence and greater reliance on lockdowns. The average lockdown lasted 12 days. According to the district court, at least 20 lockdowns lasted for 60 days.
* A review of referrals for urgent specialty care at one prison revealed that only 105 of 316 pending referrals had a scheduled appointment.
* Urgent specialty referrals at one prison had been pending for six months to a year.

Mental Health

* Wait times for mental treatment ranged as high as 12 months.
* The suicide rate in California’s prisons in 2006 was nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. A court-appointed Special Master found that “72.1% of suicides involved ‘some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment, or intervention, and were therefore most probably foreseeable and/or preventable.’”
* A federal district could found “overwhelming evidence of systemic failure to deliver necessary care to mentally ill inmates.”
* In 2007, after 12 years of examining the California penal system, a Special Master appointed by the district court reported that the state of mental health care in California’s prisons was deteriorating.
* One correctional officer reported that he had kept mentally ill prisoners in segregation for “6 months or more.” Some were held in tiny, phone booth-sized cages without toilets. “The record documents instances of prisoners committing suicide while awaiting treatment.”

This is some really awful stuff…