Coalinga Patients ‘Strike’ for More Staff

Nearly all the sex offenders housed at a new state mental hospital in Coalinga mounted a full-day “strike” Monday, refusing to participate in any organized activities, patients and hospital police said.

The patients were protesting the lack of licensed clinical staff as well as bright lights that keep them awake at night and a policy that forbids them from buying food for one another at the canteen, said patient James Rosenberg, who said they would continue their protest today.

“With the exception of maybe five inmates, we have the entire population shutting down -- from buying food, going to work, going to programs or the library,” he said. “We started peacefully demonstrating.”

The action at Coalinga State Hospital, a 1,500-bed facility that opened last fall but still houses fewer than 200 patients, coincides with concern about the shortage of trained staff there.

The Times reported Sunday that recruiting licensed caregivers to the remote facility has proved so challenging that the state Department of Mental Health has transferred only a trickle of patients from the overburdened Atascadero State Hospital.

In order to staff the hospital, state officials secured an unprecedented change in the law last summer that allowed most of the sexually violent predators at Coalinga to be monitored primarily by hospital police officers rather than nurses and psychiatric technicians. Under a 1995 law, sexually violent predators are sent to the state mental hospital system after they have served their prison terms. Courts have deemed the practice constitutional only because the hospital setting is therapeutic, not punitive.

But the vast majority of patients refuse to participate in therapy because anything they say can be used against them in the jury trials held regularly to determine whether to keep them committed.