Judge Urges Fine Over Inmate Care

A federal magistrate judge recommended Tuesday that the state Department of Corrections be held in contempt and fined $10,000 a day for failing to provide mental health treatment to hundreds of prisoners at Vacaville state prison.

Chief Magistrate Judge John F. Moulds’ findings will go to U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton, who is scheduled to hold a hearing in federal court in Sacramento in October.

Moulds’ conclusions are similar to those he reached in a separate, broader lawsuit in June when he found that the department had shown “deliberate indifference” to 28,000 mentally ill inmates throughout California’s 28 prisons. Karlton, who also is handling that suit, has yet to rule on it.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tip Kindel called the magistrate judge’s finding “ludicrous,” and said it “strikes the department as being a little odd,” particularly because a court-appointed expert recently found that the department is “making progress” in the treatment of prisoners at Vacaville.

“Fortunately, this is nothing more than a recommendation,” Kindel said.

But Donald Specter of the Prison Law Office, which brought the suit over conditions at Vacaville, called Moulds’ findings “another example of prison officials’ repeated bad faith in complying with the law.”

In addition to recommending that Karlton find the department in contempt, Moulds called on the judge in Tuesday’s case to appoint an outside “special master,” with “all powers necessary to develop and implement an outpatient psychiatric program” for Vacaville.

Moulds said eight inmates eligible for treatment as outpatients committed suicide between September, 1992, and May, 1993, at Vacaville, the main medical prison for Northern California.

Moulds quoted Dr. Vallabhanoni Meenakshi, a former chief psychiatrist at Vacaville, who toured the facility last December and reported finding “severely mentally ill prisoners were in perpetual isolation in locked cells.” Meenakshi said mentally ill prisoners locked in a segregation unit were “without blankets, mattress or clothing,” and some “covered themselves with feces.”

Moulds recommended that Karlton fine the department $10,000 a day for each day it fails to provide improved care for mentally ill inmates.

The case stems from a 1987 suit over conditions at Vacaville, and an agreement between prisoners’ lawyers and the Department of Corrections reached in 1990.

Under that consent decree, corrections pledged to set up an “outpatient” treatment program for mentally ill prisoners at Vacaville who are discharged from intensive inpatient care provided by the Department of Mental Health.

Four years after the agreement was struck, Moulds concluded, the department had “deliberately delayed implementing the mental health programs, which they agreed to implement, and have defied the orders of the district court.

“Far more egregious, however, is the fact that, while defendants have delayed and procrastinated, inmates at California Medical Facility have suffered and died as a result of conditions which the consent decree . . . was designed to correct,” Moulds wrote in the 17-page recommendation.