A Step in the Right Direction!

Funding will help ex-inmates stay clean

Grant tries to end cycle of addiction and crime

By Colette M. Jenkins
Beacon Journal staff writer

Published on Thursday, Jan 31, 2008

Beginning next week, nearly $14 million in federal grant money will be available to help released prisoners with addictions navigate the road to re-entry in Summit, Stark and Cuyahoga counties.

That was the message Wednesday from Angela L. Cornelius, director of the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services, to about 100 representatives from faith- and community-based organizations that provide substance-abuse treatment and support services in the three targeted counties.Cornelius spoke during a forum at the Interval Brotherhood Home to launch Ohio’s Access to Recovery grant, which is officially called ”Choice for Recovery.” The initiative is expected to benefit about 6,200 adult ex-offenders over the next three years by helping them break the cycle
of addiction and crime. Summit, Stark and Cuyahoga counties were targeted, because they receive the highest number of returning offenders.

”The rate of recidivism and relapse are directly tied to the lack of support these individuals receive when they return to their communities,” Cornelius said. ”This initiative gives access and choice to people who need these services to become re-engaged in life and become productive members of Ohio’s communities. It gives hope and direction for a successful recovery journey.”

Access to Recovery is a three-year program funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

It is a presidential initiative that provides vouchers to clients for substance-abuse clinical treatment and recovery support services.

Access to Recovery projects are funded in 17 other states, five tribal organizations and the District of Columbia.

First vouchers Monday

In Ohio, the first vouchers will be given Monday to ex-offenders, who have gone through an assessment process. The vouchers are to be taken to benefit coordinators, which are agencies in each county that give the voucher holder, or client, a list of appropriate providers. The client can then make a choice of provider from the list. A Web-based voucher payment system will monitor the operations and effectiveness of the Choice for Recovery program.

The coordinating agency in Cuyahoga County has not been named. In Stark County, Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities (TASC) Inc. is the benefit coordinator. Oriana House in Akron is the coordinator for Summit County.

Barriers to success

”In addition to dealing with addictions, it is clear that when those who are incarcerated are released, they face barriers like child care, transportation, housing and employment,” said Chris Richardson, program manager at Oriana House. ”We need as many agencies in the county as possible to come on board to provide the resources that ex-offenders need to get on the right path. If we can connect them with the resources that are needed, we will reduce the rate of recidivism and see fewer repeat offenders.”

The Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services is accepting applications from potential providers. Grant money can be used for treatment services, as well as recovery support services, including education, short-term housing, marriage and family counseling and life-skills training.

”These vouchers offer some positive options to people who have been incarcerated as a result of their addictions or because of problems related to their addictions,” said the Rev. Sam Ciccolini, executive director at Interval Brotherhood Home. ”What this really means is people who get caught up in the vicious cycle of addiction and being sent to prison will now be given options to get help and get into treatment.”

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Colette Jenkins can be reached at 330-996-3731 or cjenkins@thebeaconjournal.com.

A Lawsuit Like This Could be in Your Future if you Don’t Manage Inmate Health Care Properly.

Ex-inmate sues over disfiguring infection

Prison delayed care, putting life at risk, man says

By HECTOR CASTRO
P-I REPORTER

A former inmate has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the state Department of Corrections, alleging doctors ignored an infection for so long, he lost pounds of flesh in his groin.Charles Lee Manning, 60, contends the DOC and the medical staff at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen were negligent in treating an infection he contracted while he was an inmate there and violated his civil rights by not providing adequate medical care for his condition.

Later, when he was treated by doctors at Harborview Medical Center, they were able to save his life only by removing 6 pounds of flesh from his groin, including his penis and one testicle.

“The least of his problems, he is now unable to work and is going to be in debilitating pain for the remainder of his shortened life,” wrote Seattle-attorney Daniel DeLue, in a letter to the DOC he sent on Manning’s behalf, proposing a $10 million settlement.

DOC officials Monday declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, but in a statement said that the agency provides health care to 25,000 inmates annually at a cost of $111 million.

The statement also defended the quality of that care, stating the DOC hires qualified medical professionals.

Medical care in the state prison system has been an ongoing concern for inmates and their advocates.

In 2002, the family of an inmate at the McNeil Island Corrections Center was awarded $1 million in a wrongful-death settlement after alleging poor medical care at the facility led to the man’s death.

The doctor who saw Manning in prison, Dr. Muhammed A. Khurshid, no longer works for the DOC. Before he left the agency, his superiors suspended him for three days after he accepted money and other gifts from pharmaceutical companies at a time when he was in charge of buying drugs for the prison. He also was found to have violated department policy by opening a consulting business on the side, marketing himself as an expert on infectious diseases. Khurshid also is named as a defendant in several other lawsuits filed in federal court in which the quality of his medical care is questioned.

According to documents filed in U.S. District Court, Manning was incarcerated at Stafford Creek in March 2004 for a firearms violation. In early July 2004, Manning began to experience pain in his abdomen and rectal area, fever and bleeding from his rectum.

Though he requested medical care daily, it was four days before he was admitted into the prison infirmary and then another seven hours before Khurshid saw him, deciding that the symptoms were a reaction to cold medicine, according to the lawsuit.

DeLue said there was no record of Khurshid conducting a physical exam or any tests. Two days later, after Manning continued to complain of excruciating pain, Khurshid saw him again and this time diagnosed his condition as an infection.

Manning was driven to Grays Harbor Community Hospital in a police car. There, doctors immediately diagnosed Manning as having Fournier’s gangrene, which can be fatal if untreated. Manning was rushed to Harborview, where doctors had to perform the radical surgery to save his life.

Manning, a Vietnam veteran, has since been released from prison. He had previously lived an active life of hiking, fishing and working as an itinerant laborer, mostly as a painter. Now, DeLue said, Manning can barely walk, much less work. He lives in Mason County in a trailer he shares with his brother.

“No one would even touch this guy because they view him as subhuman,” DeLue said, adding, “When even basic medical care is not provided because they don’t even want to touch a person, that is totally unacceptable.”

P-I reporter Hector Castro can be reached at 206-448-8334 or hectorcastro@seattlepi.com.

Shake up in California.

California Prison Health Morass Now in the Hands of a New Receiver Appointed by Federal Court Judge

Receiver Robert Sillen Thanked by the Court as Clark Kelso Takes Over

By Frank D. Russo

Robert Sillen lasted just shy of two years as receiver of the California Prison’s health care “system,” and will be missed by a number of those who appreciated the direct manner in which he brought attention to problems that have resulted in many avoidable deaths and serious health problems to those inmates who languished under treatment the Federal Courts have labeled as “cruel and unusual punishment.” He was abrasive at times, often irascible, minced no words as he spoke very forcefully about the problems of the prisons, and was not afraid to go where others had not in turning the system upside down and implementing strong emergency measures and starting systemic reforms.

Looking back to the situation of the prisons in 2005 when the courts placed them in receivership, Sillen was, by my lights, exactly what was needed to jolt the prisons, nudge elected officials in California, and get the beginning of changes in place. He could keep a roomful of reporters and policy makers in rapt attention, as he did when speaking at the Sacramento Press Club in July.

In an order issued yesterday by U.S. Federal Court Judge Thelton Henderson, one can see the Judge’s reasoning behind his order replacing Sillen and appointing Clark Kelso as the new receiver. The judge thanked Sillen and noted his successes, but felt it was time to move on to a new phase. The problems clearly are not going away and a trial is scheduled on whether a three judge panel should order the release of some prisoners or other measures to alleviate overcrowding and severe health problems in the prisons.

Here are excerpts from Judge Henderson’s order, which also provide biographical information on Mr. Kelso, the new receiver:

“On February 14, 2006, the Court appointed Robert Sillen “to serve as the Receiver inthis case, at the pleasure of the Court, effective Monday, April 17, 2006.” …Much progress has been made since the Receivership was established, and theReceiver has successfully recruited and hired a team of correctional and clinical experts to assist him with his remedial obligations. …

For example, vacancy rates among clinical staff in prisons have been dramatically reduced as a result of increased salaries and improved hiring processes. Similarly, many clinically appropriate changes have been made, including the replacement of medical technical assistants with licensed vocational nurses, and several necessary clinical construction projects have been initiated. In its first two years, the Receivership has also resolved the CDCR specialty care contracting crisis, which was preventing inmates from receiving needed care from clinical specialists, and established a successful prison improvement pilot project at San Quentin State Prison.

Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the system for delivering health care to California’s inmate population remains below constitutional standards and continues to be in need of repair – not through any fault of the Receiver or his staff, but, rather, primarily as a result of the extreme dysfunction the Receiver inherited from the State, as well as the numerous problems and obstacles encountered by the Receiver that were not anticipated at the time the Receivership was established.

The Court originally ordered the Receiver to file his Plan of Action within 180 to 210 days of his appointment, id. at 2, but later granted the Receiver’s request for an extension of time. On December 19, 2006, the Court granted the Receiver until May 15, 2007, to file his initial Plan of Action with metrics “that are realistic, fully informed, detailed, and effective,” with a revised Plan of Action due by November 15, 2007. [citations omitted here and elsewhere] In the same order, the Court granted the Receiver’s request to delay appointment of an advisory board until after the filing of the initial Plan of Action.

The Receiver timely filed his initial Plan of Action on May 10, 2007. Following the Court’s independent review of that plan and consideration of Plaintiffs’ responses to the plan, including arguments raised during an August 27, 2007 hearing, the Court found that the initial Plan of Action failed to contain adequate metrics and time lines. The Court ordered that the Receiver include such benchmarks in his revised Plan of Action to be filed in November 2007.

The Court also observed at the August 27, 2007 hearing that it had not furnished the type of hands-on leadership that, in retrospect, it wished it had, and the Court resolved to provide such leadership as this case moved forward. To that end, the Court appointed Starr Babcock as a Pro Bono Special Assistant to the Court to assist with special projects, including the creation of “an advisory working group to assist the Court with evaluating the Receiver’s [revised] Plan of Action . . . and determining how best to assemble the advisory board.”

Following the Receiver’s timely filing of his revised Plan of Action on November 15, 2007, the Court provided the advisory working group with a copy of the revised plan and convened the group for a one-day meeting on December 8, 2007. The Pro Bono Special Assistant to the Court had numerous individual conversations with advisory working group members both before and after the December 8 meeting. The Receiver, as well as counsel for Plaintiffs and Defendants, made presentations to and answered questions from the advisory working group at that meeting.

The group subsequently reached two main consensus opinions during closed-session discussions. First, the advisory group recommended that a professional planner be hired to assist the Receiver in revising the Plan of Action so that it both complied with the Court’s orders and directions and could serve as a useful leadership document that would provide a common vision for all stakeholders. In addition, the working group was unanimous in its recommendation that an advisory board be formed to assist in the planning process and, more broadly, to advise the Court on issues relating to the Receivership’s operation and progress towards implementing a prison medical care system that meets constitutional standards. The Court agrees with and adopts both of these recommendations, as ordered below.

The Receivership has reached a critical juncture at which it must now move from a primarily investigative and evaluative phase, during which the Receivership analyzed the current system to determine what reforms were necessary and worked to create the infrastructure required to effectuate such reforms, into an implementation phase, during which the Receivership must translate the conceptualized reforms into reality. Throughout its existence, the Receivership has developed and put into practice critical short-term measures, and such measures must continue to be adopted to address issues requiring urgent attention. However, the Receivership’s focus can and must now shift towards long-term reform that will achieve the implementation of a sustainable, constitutionally adequate system of delivering medical care to Plaintiffs – and, not inconsequentially, a system that must ultimately be transitioned back to the State of California’s control.

Put another way, the Receivership’s overarching goal should be working itself out of existence once delivery of medical care to California’s inmates has been brought up to constitutional standards.

After careful reflection and deliberation, the Court has concluded that such work would best be accomplished by appointing a new Receiver who brings a different set of strengths appropriate to guiding the Receivership through its second phase. While the current Receiver has successfully used his unique skills and bold, creative leadership style to investigate, confront, and break down many of the barriers that existed at the inception of the Receivership, the second phase of the Receivership demands a substantially different set of administrative skills and style of collaborative leadership. The Receivership must continue to maintain its independence as an arm of the federal courts established to take over state operations, but it also must work more closely at this stage with all stakeholders, including State officials, to ensure that the system developed and implemented by the Receivership can be transferred back to the State in a reasonable time frame. Such collaboration appears to be more important now than ever, given the current budget crisis faced by the State of California.

Accordingly, with good cause appearing, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that:

1. The Court’s appointment of Robert Sillen as the Receiver in this case is hereby terminated, and all prior authority vested by the Court in Mr. Sillen is hereby revoked, effective immediately.

2. J. Clark Kelso is appointed to serve as the Receiver in this case, at the pleasure of the Court, effective immediately. All powers, privileges, and responsibilities of the Receiver, as set forth in the Court’s February 14, 2006 Order Appointing Receiver, shall continue in full effect, except as modified by subsequent orders of this Court. A short biography of Mr. Kelso is attached to this order.

3. The Pro Bono Special Assistant to the Court shall assist the Receiver in reworking the November 15, 2007 Plan of Action so that it is a more useful leadership document. The Receiver and Pro Bono Special Assistant shall consider how best to choose and use the services of a professional planner to assist in this process, the costs of which shall be borne by Defendants as part of the Receivership’s budget.

4. The Court will shortly be appointing an advisory board to assist and advise the Court and the Receiver as this case moves forward.

THELTON E. HENDERSON, JUDGE
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

J. Clark Kelso

Biographical Information
J. Clark Kelso is a Professor of Law and, for the last twelve years, has been the Director of the Capital Center for Government Law and Policy at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California. He comes to the California Prison Health Care Receivership with over fifteen years of experience in a wide variety of positions in all three branches of state government. Throughout this service, he has successfully improved state programs and operations while developing a well-known reputation for independence, integrity, and collaborative leadership.

In the 1990s, Kelso worked with the California Judicial Council and Administrative Office of the Courts on a number of task forces and commissions. This work, particularly his efforts in support of unification of the state’s trial courts, led to his receipt of the 1998 Bernard E. Witkin Amicus Curiae Award, the highest honor given to an individual other than a member of the judiciary for outstanding contributions to California’s courts.

In July 2000, Kelso was selected by then Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Governor Gray Davis as the interim replacement for outgoing Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, who abruptly resigned amid allegations of corruption. Kelso’s leadership quickly restored public trust to the Department of Insurance.

In June 2002, Governor Davis appointed Kelso to serve as the State’s Chief Information Officer and charged him with restoring the state’s crumbling information technology program. After Governor Davis’s recall, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger retained Kelso in the State CIO position. Focusing on the disciplines of strategic planning, collaborative execution, and workforce development, Kelso turned the state’s information technology (“IT”) program around, in two years moving the state from 47th to 12th in Brown University’s annual e-government report. In his State CIO role, Kelso also supported the development of state policies encouraging health information technologies and data sharing to improve quality, transparency, and accountability in public and private health care delivery systems. In recognition of his accomplishments, he received a “Top 25 Award for 2004 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers” from Government Technology and was named by Computerworld to their list of “Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2007.”

A 1983 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Professor Kelso clerked for Judge Anthony M. Kennedy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Kelso joined the faculty at Pacific McGeorge in 1986 after practicing law briefly in the New York offices of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler. A registered Republican, Kelso is married to Kari Kelso, Ph.D., and they have two daughters.”

Posted on January 24, 2008

Another Day, Another Death in our Prisons..

Panel Mulls Neglected Prisoner’s Death

By MICHAEL GRACZYK – 11 hours ago

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Prison medical staff shortages led to conditions that allowed an inmate with a broken back to lay in his own filth for two days before dying in a hospital, a state lawmaker said in a hearing into the death on Thursday.
Larry Louis Cox, 48, died Feb. 6, 2007, after being transferred from the high-security section at the Estelle Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to a prison hospital in Galveston, where doctors found he had three broken vertebrae and a spinal fracture.
Prison officials believe Cox suffered the injuries two weeks before his death during a scuffle with guards in which Cox hit his head on a bunk and storage locker.
Prison officials said Cox was given a CT scan at a Huntsville hospital, but it revealed only a broken nose. They think his spinal injuries may have been overlooked, and that Cox may have aggravated those injuries during the next two days.
Before he was hospitalized, Cox told guards he was having trouble moving. He was given Tylenol because the prison clinic was closed for the night.
The following morning, he was given two prescription drugs and returned to his cell. He was unable to take more medication because of his mobility problems, and a patient care assistant recorded that as a refusal to take medication.
A guard worried about Cox’s condition violated policy and contacted his stepmother, a nurse at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, which handles prisoner health care. She arranged for a nurse from another prison to examine Cox. That nurse found Cox badly injured, lying on the floor in his own excrement, and had him transferred to Galveston.
The Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Cox’s death a homicide caused by medical neglect after he suffered blunt force trauma.
No one has been prosecuted in the case and officials still disagree over who to blame.
State Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said at a hearing about the case on Thursday that a shortage of medical staff was largely to blame.
“The Legislature passes the budget and makes policy. I think the shortage of personnel played a critical role,” Whitmire said.
John Moriarty, the prison system’s inspector general, said guards were not to blame, but that prison medical staff could have done better.
“It’s my firm belief we got to the bottom of what happened,” he said, pointing at a lack of proper medical response within the prison.
Moriarty said investigators came to the “collective conclusion … we had criminally negligent homicide. That’s why we moved forward.”
“The individual had deteriorated so bad,” he said. “Somebody should have done something.”
But Capt. Antonio Leal, a Texas Ranger assigned to examine the case after Whitmire demanded an investigation, disagreed with Moriarty’s assessment.
“Looking for somebody to indict in this deal, it’s not here, Senator,” Leal said. “There is no one criminally responsible for this man’s death.
“This is just one of those circumstances where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong… Inmates every day play the system, but no one deserved to die like this.”
Ben Raimer, the head of correctional managed health care at UTMB defended prison medical staff. He said there was a 50 percent shortage of physicians working in the prison system, an 18 percent shortage of medical practitioners and an 18 percent vacancy rate for nurses.
He said the Cox case had been “reviewed and reviewed and reviewed” and that disciplinary action had been taken against some of those involved “but we’re not sure they did anything wrong.”
Cox was sentenced in 1990 to 20 years in prison for burglary with intent to commit sexual assault. He sentenced to another 15 years for murder in 1998 for killing his cellmate at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont.

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Off to Grapevine

I’ll be at the ACA show in Grapevine this weekend, so stop by the Medcom Correctional Services booth if you have a moment or have any questions about our services.  I’d be glad to meet you.

Next week I plan on launching a series of posts on effective strategies to cut your correctional facility’s  health care costs.  Some of the topics that I plan on covering are contracting strategies for community providers, medical claims adjudication processes, in-house operations and staffing, pharmacy services, and hiring consultants to help.

Check back next week, and I hope to see you in Grapevine!

Tough on Crime in the 80s and 90s… Tough on the Bank Account Today…

Moderation. A word for our generation. At least it should have been.

Instead, ours was a generation of excess. It was all or nothing. That thought led to unprecedented levels of greed and corruption in America during the 80s and 90s. It also led to some of the worst decision making when it came to crime and punishment. Three Strikes, The War on Drugs, and conservative talk show hosts that demanded harsh punishment for all offenders (until they were the ones offending) packed our jails and prisons with the highest number of citizens per capita of any country in the world.

We sure showed those criminals, didn’t we. We stopped illegal drug use in America. We have the lowest levels of crime in the world. We have a legal system that is fair and just and treats ALL citizens equally…

Yeah, right. Nothing has changed, except now we can’t pay for it. I’m sure that was never a concern for our conservative brethren. Paying for something has never been a concern of theirs. Just write a check, and leave it to our grandkids to pay the bill. Whatever you have to do, just keep those media ratings and poll numbers rising.

Here’s a great story from the LA Times this morning:

Prisoners of panic

Media hype and political quick fixes have swelled our inmate population.

By Joe Domanick

January 6, 2008

How much more folly, absurdity, fiscal irresponsibility and human tragedy will we endure before we stop tolerating the political pandering that has dictated our criminal justice law and policy over the last two decades?

The pattern has become all too clear. Our politicians, fearful of being labeled “soft on crime,” react to sensationalistic coverage of a crime with knee-jerk, quick-fix answers. Only years later do the mistakes, false assumptions and unexpected consequences begin to emerge, and then the criminal justice system is forced to deal with the mess created by the bad lawmaking.

For example, remember the great crack scare of the 1980s? When basketball superstar Len Bias, who’d been drafted by the Boston Celtics as a franchise player, died of a crack overdose, the media went wild in covering it. Alarmed by the sudden increase in crack use and fearful that the drug was highly addictive and disposed users to commit violence, Congress mandated tough minimum sentences for crack-related crimes. A defendant convicted of possessing a small amount of crack could receive the same sentence as one possessing 100 times that amount of powder cocaine. Because crack users were disproportionately African American (and powder cocaine users were disproportionately white), 85% of those receiving dealer-like sentences for possession or sale of small amounts of crack were black — an outcome that helped to fuel widespread perceptions among blacks that there was a double standard of justice in the U.S.

In December, the overly harsh and misguided sentencing policy concocted during the “war on drugs” in the 1980s was finally modified. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges were no longer bound by the strict sentencing guidelines, freeing the jurists to craft punishment that best fits the crime and the background of the defendant.

The 1990s produced its own racially tinged crime panics. Led by John J. Dilulio Jr., a political scientist at Princeton University, and William J. Bennett, a former secretary of Education in the Reagan Cabinet, law-and-order proponents declared that the U.S. was being overrun by a new generation of remorseless “super-predators” spawned by crack-head mothers in violence-infested ghettos. Stories of kids committing heinous crimes were common in the media. One of the most sensational occurred in Chicago in October 1994. Two boys, one 10 years old, the other 11, dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse from the 14th floor of a housing project, killing him, because he refused to steal candy for them.

In response to such crimes, politicians across the country passed anti-super-predator laws. In many states, including California, the age kids could be tried as adults was lowered to 14, and in 48 states, the decision to try juveniles as adults was taken away from judges and given to prosecutors. As a result, the number of people under 18 tried as adults rose dramatically through the 1990s, and a small percentage of them were even sentenced to prison. Ironically, the predicted crime explosion caused by super-predators never materialized. Juvenile arrests declined by more than 45% from 1994 to 2004, according to FBI statistics.

But the ultimate example of media hype meeting irresponsible politicians to produce bad public policy is California’s three-strikes law. It was chiefly written by Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds after the murder of his daughter, Kimber, in 1992.Introduced in the Legislature, the bill languished until the rape and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. A network of right-wing talk-radio hosts reacted to the killing by fiercely promoting Reynolds’ measure, which had provisions like no other three-strikes bill in that virtually any crime, no matter how petty, could be prosecuted as a third strike.

In 1994, the Legislature unanimously put the measure on the November ballot, and Proposition 184 passed easily. The law would eventually send thousands of Californians to prison for 25 years to life, some for such third-strike crimes as attempting to steal a bottle of vitamins from a drug store, buying a macadamia nut disguised as a $5 rock of cocaine from an undercover cop and shoplifting $2.69 worth of AA batteries.

Today, Californians are still paying the price for that folly and other like-minded laws, not just in the ruined and wasted lives of people sentenced under these laws, but in other ways. There are now tens of thousands of inmates in California convicted of nonviolent crimes and serving out long second- and third-strike sentences, as well as thousands more behind bars because minor crimes were turned into felonies with mandatory minimum sentences.

All these laws have contributed to severe overcrowding in the state’s prisons — as high as 200% of capacity — that has produced conditions of such “extreme peril” for prisoners and guards that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced to declare a systemwide state of emergency in 2006. Since 2003, the inmate population has grown 8%, to about 173,000. But the budget of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has skyrocketed 79%, to $8.5 billion, becoming the fastest-growing category in the state budget and a factor in opening up a $14-billion budget deficit.

The get-tough-on-crime laws also have helped create a crisis in California’s prison healthcare system, where spending has risen to $1.9 billion a year, up 263% since 2000. A large part of the problem is that the prison population is aging because inmates are serving the longer sentences approved by lawmakers, and with aging comes more medical problems. The system became so understaffed and dysfunctional that a federal judge ruled that it was causing at least one avoidable death a week through sheer neglect and ineptitude. He has seized the entire prison medical system and placed it under his direct supervision.

Faced with the huge budget deficit and judicial threats to cap the state’s prison population, Schwarzenegger’s office has been floating the idea of early release for about 22,000 inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes. That 13% cut in prisoners, however, would require legislative approval, something that is by no means certain. The story of crime and punishment in California — and the country — since the 1980s, after all, has been quick-fix answers fueled by media hype. Let’s hope that such proposals as releasing nonviolent inmates receive serious attention rather than panicky headlines that lead to bad criminal justice laws.

Joe Domanick, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, is writing a book about California’s prison system.