Three years into government control of California’s prison health care system, prisoner deaths are dropping, but preventable deaths are still too high. And one report pins some of the blame for the crisis on uncontrolled overtime for prison nurses, who were more likely to earn overtime than any other state employees in 2008.
The Sacramento Bee reports that California spent $60 million on overtime for nurses in 2008, and another $111 million for the guards that protect medical workers during procedures. All of this in a year when 66 prisoners died of afflictions that could have been prevented or treated had they been diagnosed.
Excessive overtime is often an issue with corrections officers, whether it’s forced by a shortage of employees for overcrowded prisons or the result of opportunists piling on unnecessary shifts in an unwatched corner of the state payroll. But the SacBee report shows that nurse overtime needs to be controlled as well. In 2008, three physician assistants and 52 nurses earned more than corrections secretary Matthew Cate. California spent $300 per prisoner on nurses while New York spent $100.
Prison nurses, doctors and other health professionals work hard in a difficult environment, and they deserve to be paid well — if we underpay it would be difficult to retain good workers and prisoner health would suffer further. But this is a difficult balance to strike, and when state overtime is opened up, workers often take advantage. One superhuman medical assistant reportedly claimed to work an average of 26.5 hours per day in 2008.
In a 2006, the federal courts ordered in a class-action lawsuit that a government receiver take over California’s struggling prison health system. Care has improved, but the class action suit is ongoing and the state is appealing to the Supreme Court. Some of this problem is systematic, and some is personal. When a worker reports 26.5 hours in a day, she knows she’s doing something wrong. As we work to change our prisons and move beyond the decades of overcrowding and abuse, there’s a measure of personal responsibility necessary.
Another great report on California’s prison crisis came recently from the OC Register, which ran two parts of a four part series on the impact of tough-on-crime legislation. Parts 3 and 4 are coming later this month.
h/t Prisonmovement