{"id":13530,"date":"2011-05-26T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-26T10:35:42","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T10:35:42","slug":"california-fails-even-at-releasing-sick-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2011\/05\/26\/california-fails-even-at-releasing-sick-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"California Fails Even at Releasing Sick Prisoners"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"275\" height=\"236\" align=right src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TRPxN7DGy5c\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>Robert wrote about the <a href=\"https:\/\/calitics.com\/diary\/13519\/supreme-court-calls-bs-on-california\">Supreme Court&#8217;s decision to force massive reductions in the prison population<\/a>, yet the prisons aren&#8217;t even doing what they are required to do to allow medical parole. &nbsp;David Dayen covered the story of a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.firedoglake.com\/2011\/05\/25\/california-denies-medical-parole-to-quadraplegic-despite-court-order-to-reduce-prison-population\/\">quadriplegic patient who was denied parole<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is completely insane. Here you have a quadriplegic &#8211; maybe a bad dude in his heart, but incapable of acting on it in any way &#8211; that we&#8217;re spending $625,000 to hold in prison for no reason. Under normal circumstances this would be a waste of money &#8211; under the circumstances that California, under a Supreme Court ruling, must reduce the prison population, it&#8217;s unconscionable. This guy is taking up the space of some other criminal. There are people in comas in state prisons. When lawmakers passed this bill, they didn&#8217;t just want parole hearings, they wanted people who could not threaten society released, as a least-worst option to relieve a prison crisis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeanne Woodford, a former director of the state prison system and current <a href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2011\/may\/12\/local\/la-me-0512-warden-anti-death-penalty-20110512\">anti-death penalty leader<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/05\/25\/us\/25prison.html\">called out the system as unsustainable<\/a>, as have columnists like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/local\/la-me-0525-lopez-getoutofjail-20110523,0,1002589.column\">LA Times&#8217; Steve Lopez<\/a>. &nbsp;Yet even with a Supreme Court order hanging over their heads, little changes.<\/p>\n<p>Both the Democrats and the Republicans are addicted to the prison system. &nbsp;They are addicted to the simple solutions that it presents, and afraid to confront the more difficult issues of prevention and treatment. &nbsp;Perhaps the Supreme Court decision changes that, but don&#8217;t count on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TRPxN7DGy5c\">Incarcerex<\/a> going down without a fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"275\" height=\"236\" align=right src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TRPxN7DGy5c\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>Robert wrote about the <a href=\"https:\/\/calitics.com\/diary\/13519\/supreme-court-calls-bs-on-california\">Supreme Court&#8217;s decision to force massive reductions in the prison population<\/a>, yet the prisons aren&#8217;t even doing what they are required to do to allow medical parole. &nbsp;David Dayen covered the story of a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.firedoglake.com\/2011\/05\/25\/california-denies-medical-parole-to-quadraplegic-despite-court-order-to-reduce-prison-population\/\">quadriplegic patient who was denied parole<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is completely insane. Here you have a quadriplegic &#8211; maybe a bad dude in his heart, but incapable of acting on it in any way &#8211; that we&#8217;re spending $625,000 to hold in prison for no reason. Under normal circumstances this would be a waste of money &#8211; under the circumstances that California, under a Supreme Court ruling, must reduce the prison population, it&#8217;s unconscionable. This guy is taking up the space of some other criminal. There are people in comas in state prisons. When lawmakers passed this bill, they didn&#8217;t just want parole hearings, they wanted people who could not threaten society released, as a least-worst option to relieve a prison crisis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeanne Woodford, a former director of the state prison system and current <a href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2011\/may\/12\/local\/la-me-0512-warden-anti-death-penalty-20110512\">anti-death penalty leader<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/05\/25\/us\/25prison.html\">called out the system as unsustainable<\/a>, as have columnists like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/local\/la-me-0525-lopez-getoutofjail-20110523,0,1002589.column\">LA Times&#8217; Steve Lopez<\/a>. &nbsp;Yet even with a Supreme Court order hanging over their heads, little changes.<\/p>\n<p>Both the Democrats and the Republicans are addicted to the prison system. &nbsp;They are addicted to the simple solutions that it presents, and afraid to confront the more difficult issues of prevention and treatment. &nbsp;Perhaps the Supreme Court decision changes that, but don&#8217;t count on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TRPxN7DGy5c\">Incarcerex<\/a> going down without a fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-200"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3we","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}