CA Prison Healthcare System A Mess

On Monday, the three-judge panel with the power to cap California's prison population will meet for an organizational meeting. While the prison healthcare system is already in receivership, the panel might want to take into account these grim statistics about the state of health, and how the overcrowding issue impacts everything else in prison life.

As many as one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable, according to a study of medical care in 32 state lockups that will be used to help rebuild the troubled system.

One inmate, who reported extreme chest pains in the middle of the night, died of a heart ailment after waiting eight hours to see a doctor.

Another who complained for days of severe abdominal pain died of acute pancreatitis after medical staff did not believe his pleas were credible.

A third died after a two-year delay in diagnosis of his testicular cancer.

And an asthma patient died after failing to receive steroid medication for two days following transfer from a county jail.

In fact, ASTHMA was the ailment most likely to cause a preventable death. Not a shiv in the shower, not a rumble in the exercise yard. Asthma. This is straight out of the 19th century.

Between delays in diagnosis, failure to treat symptoms properly, and lack of access to doctors, the common thread here is that there aren't enough doctors, aren't enough facilities, and aren't enough overseers to adequately care for inmates. It comes directly out of the overcrowding that is plaguing everything in the corrections process.

Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents prison doctors, said: "We feel that the doctors in [the prisons] have been working in a battlefield situation. They do not have the tools to practice good medicine. The system needs work."

The cost of reorganizing the healthcare system will be enormous and take over a decade. It'd be a lot easier if sentencing reform allowed the jails to have a manageable population, but leadership was not forthcoming in this session. This is the result.