A federal panel has refused to eliminate the receiver overseeing California prison health care.
The ruling clears the way for federal Receiver J. Clark Kelso to proceed with his $1.9 billion construction plan to add medical beds to the state’s 32 prisons.
The decision was announced by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 30.
Kelso was appointed by U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson of San Francisco under authority of the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act. The move came as a result of a decades-long class action lawsuit filed by inmates challenging poor health care in the state’s adult prisons.
Kelso’s job was to bring prison health care up to acceptable constitutional standards. Initially the state did not object to the appointment of a receiver in 2006, and admitted that it was unable to remedy the problem within its prisons. Only when the state’s economy collapsed did legal efforts begin to rid California of the receiver.
California faces a projected budget shortfall of $19 billion through June of 2011.
Prisons chief Matthew Cate claimed Henderson had no authority to appoint Kelso, and that Kelso then had no authority to order the construction of 10,000 additional beds, at a cost of approximately $6 billion.
With the onset of the state’s financial crisis, Kelso responded with his current, more modest proposal for two new hospitals and 3,400 beds intended for acute and long-term care.
“The problem has not been with a lack of plans, but with the state’s ability to execute them,” the appellate panel said in its ruling. The court ruled that the appointment of the receiver was the least intrusive way to ensure inmates’ rights.
“The state to this day has not pointed to any evidence that it could remedy its constitutional violations in the absence of the receivership,” the judges declared.
