Stockton Record: Editorial On Stockton Prison Medical Facility Contract

The good, the bad, the ugly

Prison hospital helps county, but system problems remain

 

The Stockton Record Editorial

June 19, 2011 12:01 AM

A contract worth more than $500 million has been awarded to build the main portion of a huge new prison medical facility in Stockton.

Ironically, the same day state officials announced the award, the federal receiver for prison health care issued a report saying the state needs even more hospital beds for state inmates, thousands more.

This maddeningly complex issue has aspects that are wonderful for Stockton, potentially harmful for San Joaquin County and downright scary for California.

The award of a $512 million contract kicks off construction of a 1,722-bed prison hospital facility for mentally and physically ill state prisoners. The contract went to a joint venture of Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Md., and McCarthy Building Cos. of St. Louis.

While both have headquarters out of state, both also have a long-time, presence in California. Clark has a regional office in Oakland and McCarthy has regional offices in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Both have vowed that a good number of the 5,000-plus construction jobs the project will generate will go to local residents. That is great news in a county with a jobless rate in the upper teens and a construction trades sector that's been walloped by the recession. Once complete, the facility will create about 2,400 permanent jobs.

More problematic for the county is what happens after the hospital opens in 2013. Will it drain the area's limited pool of doctors, nurses and medical technicians? There has been progress toward increasing local training programs, especially through San Joaquin Delta College, but concerns remain that it will not be enough to backfill the gap created by the draw of high paying state jobs.

All of this prison hospital building comes against the backdrop of a federal court order, upheld this month by the U.S. Supreme Court, to reduce the state prison population.

The courts found that the state system is so far over capacity that it constitutes a constitutional violation. That overcrowding has resulted in what the court has determined to be inadequate medical care for the 152,000 inmates. This despite the state spending more than $9.7 billion annually on prisons and parole.

The state has reduced the prison population in recent years. Nearly 10,000 inmates are incarcerated out-of-state, for example.

But the Supreme Court this month gave the state two years to bring the prison population down even more, to 137.5 percent of the system's design capacity. That means about 33,000 more inmates must be released or housed elsewhere.

Gov. Jerry Brown's plan - euphemistically called "realignment" - is to place "low-level" inmates in county jails. The problem is there is no money for that. And, given what's going on in Sacramento, there likely won't be any money for that.

And layered on top of all of this is a report out last week from J. Clark Kelso, the federal receiver for health care. That's exactly what Kelso, who was appointed by the federal court to carry out the court's order to improve inmate health care, will tell the federal court.

In his report, Kelso said even with the massive new facility being built in Stockton, thousands of additional hospital beds must be provided.

"The bottom line is that there is no question we need these beds to meet federal court mandates," Kelso said.

There also is no question there is no money. There also is no question there is no citizen desire to improve conditions for inmates when teachers, firefighters and police officers are being fired, jobs are scarce, and homes are in foreclosure.

Neither lack of money nor citizen opposition matter.

What does is the federal court order.