A recent inquiry has found that 5 of the 6 private prisons that CA contracts out to failed to provide adequate medical care for inmates in 2016.
The audit findings include patients not being seen in a timely manner, patients not receiving their medications as required, and failing to properly dispose of used needles. In several facilities, nurses didn’t refer patients to a physician. In some instances, nurses didn’t confirm the identity of an individual before administering medications.
This is problematic, folks. Follow the layers: The Supreme Court mandated CA to reduce prison overcrowding in order to provide better healthcare to inmates. CA responded by shipping non-violent, non-serious, and non-sexual offenders to county jails to alleviate overcrowding, but these facilities don’t have expansive medical units because they are designed for temporary housing. One of CA’s other responses was to rely more on private prisons to warehouse inmates, facilities which — you guessed it — fail to provide adequate healthcare. Ostensibly CA is committed to providing healthcare to inmates, but empirical trends paint a different picture.
Confronting California's prison crisis 