SACRAMENTO — A federal judge has found California prison officials guilty of civil contempt for failing to hire enough mental health professionals to properly treat tens of thousands of inmates with serious mental disorders.
Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller ordered the state to pay $112 million in penalties on June 25 as the state tries to close a multibillion-dollar budget deficit. The fines began accumulating in April 2023 after Judge Mueller said she was tired of understaffing the state prison system despite years of court orders calling on the state to address the problem.
“The sanctions imposed here are necessary to underscore and sharpen Defendants’ sense of urgency to finally achieve a lasting solution to the chronic mental health staffing shortages in the state’s prison system,” Judge Mueller wrote in his ruling in the long-running class action lawsuit.
“The ongoing harm caused by these high vacancy rates is as evident today as it was 30 years ago, and the harm continues despite multiple court orders directing defendants to reduce vacancy rates,” she added.
Mueller ordered the state to pay the fine within 30 days and said the money would be “used only for procedures necessary to comply with the court’s staffing orders.” He also ordered California to continue paying an additional fine for each month the state continues to violate the court order.
The ruling was unwelcome news for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is struggling with a budget deficit that has forced him to make cuts to many state programs.
“The contempt finding is deeply flawed and does not reflect reality,” said Diana Crofts Pelayo, a spokeswoman for Governor Newsom. “In the face of a national shortage of mental health therapists, my Administration has led a massive, unprecedented effort to expand care and recruit and retain mental health professionals.”
Terry Hardy, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the state will appeal Mueller’s order. Hardy said the state has taken “unusual steps to expand access to mental health care,” so “inmates often have greater access to mental health care while in custody than those on the outside currently receive.”
Mueller’s contempt finding comes as Newsom, a Democrat, has prioritized improving mental health treatment statewide as part of efforts to tackle California’s intractable homelessness problem. Newsom’s administration argues that Mueller is setting impossible standards for improving treatment for the roughly 34,000 inmates with serious mental illnesses, more than a third of California’s prison population.
Lawyers who represent prisoners with mental illnesses strongly oppose this.
“It’s extremely unfortunate that state officials have allowed these conditions to deteriorate to this extent and for so long,” said Ernest Galvan, an attorney representing the prisoners in the long-running lawsuit, “and I hope that this order, which the judge reserved as a last resort, will refocus the officials’ attention on what needs to happen: bringing life-saving medical care to the prison, where it is urgently needed.”
As part of a tentative contempt ruling in March, Mueller ordered Newsom and five other state officials to personally read aloud testimony from a prison mental health worker who described ongoing issues at trial last fall.
The remaining five were the commissioners of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the State Hospital Department, and the Department of Finance, as well as the assistant commissioner for health services in the Department of Corrections and the deputy commissioner for statewide mental health programs.
Special Counsel Mueller limited his formal contempt findings to Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber and his assistants, Deputy Secretary Diana Tocchet and Deputy Secretary Amar Mehta.
“Essentially, the overall record shows that Defendants have taken a ‘business as usual’ approach to hiring, recruiting and retention and have done little to transform the bureaucratic mechanisms through which hiring practices are carried out,” Mueller wrote.
Mueller ordered state officials to assess a penalty for each month that the prison mental health professional vacancy rate exceeds 10 percent, based on the maximum annual salary for each position, including those that approach or exceed $300,000.
The 10 percent vacancy limit dates back more than two decades to a court order issued by Mueller’s predecessor in 2002 in response to a class-action lawsuit filed in 1990 over poor treatment of prisoners with mental disabilities.
The $112 million unpaid fine for staffing shortfalls is one of three imposed by Mueller.
She imposed fines of $1,000 a day in 2017 for stalling the process of sending inmates to state mental health facilities. But that fine, now more than $4.2 million, has never been collected, and Mueller postponed a scheduled hearing on the fine after the inmates’ lawyers said the state was working to make improvements.
In April 2023, Mueller also began imposing $1,000-a-day fines for the state’s failure to implement court-ordered suicide prevention measures, after a court-appointed expert said his most recent prison inspection found the state remains out of full compliance.
This article KFF Health NewsPublication California Healthlinean editorially independent service California Health Care Foundation.
