Care for Mentally Ill Inmates Scrutinized

U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton of Sacramento, who 10 years ago ordered state prisons to improve their care of mentally ill inmates, became alarmed this year by reports of repeated failures in such care at Corcoran prison.

In March, Karlton ordered a review of employee attitudes toward the mentally ill at the prison and required the institution to provide him monthly reports of guards’ use of force against mentally ill inmates.

Karlton is presiding over an ongoing 1990 class-action lawsuit that challenges the quality of mental-health care in the state prison system. In a separate suit, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson in San Francisco this month threatened to impose a receiver to oversee general healthcare in the state prisons.

About 20% of the 163,000 inmates in California state prisons are diagnosed with some form of mental illness.

Karlton issued his new order in March, after a special master whom he had appointed to oversee the situation reported that Corcoran’s program for mentally ill inmates was “exceedingly troubled.”

In one cellblock, inmates were confined naked and without mattresses or blankets, wrote Special Master J. Michael Keating Jr.

The staff response to inmates who failed to take medications was erratic, and the care of psychotic inmates in the highest-security housing units was “simply unacceptable,” Keating wrote.

“Some renegade elements of custody staff ... apparently took it upon themselves to apply their own benighted version of how best to handle seriously mentally disordered inmates,” the report said.

Keating’s report said that although a fourth of Corcoran’s 5,000 prisoners are mentally ill, they accounted for half of the inmates upon whom officers used force. The report prompted Karlton to order that Corcoran review its use-of-force policy.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to spend an extra $5 million to hire additional mental health staff to comply with Karlton’s latest order.

Roderick Q. Hickman, the state’s top prisons official, said recently that he had not reviewed Keating’s report and was unaware of the problems cited at Corcoran.