The federal courts are about to start handing responsibility for inmate health care back to California corrections officials.
It is the first step in ending a seven-year-old receivership that has cost the state billions of dollars to improve prison medical conditions.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will assume responsibility Friday for hiring employees and preparing to open a $1 billion prison medical complex in Stockton.
If the transition goes well, the court-appointed overseer predicted his control of inmate medical care could end in about a year. A federal judge is likely to appoint a special master to monitor the state’s compliance at least into 2014.
Taxpayers are paying a price
Californians spend about $23.4 million a year to treat state inmates with valley fever.
The California prison system estimates about 200 inmates are hospitalized every year due to valley fever. Most of them are diagnosed with the disease while serving sentences in eight institutions in the San Joaquin Valley, where the airborne fungus that causes valley fever is rampant.
That doesn't include federal inmates at prisons like Taft, which was described in one lawsuit as a "petri dish for valley fever."
A study by the state prison health system found that the rate of valley fever in Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga was 600 times the rate found outside the prison walls in Fresno County.
When you add up all the time state inmates spend in the hospital for valley fever, it amounts to an average of 5,000 days, or about 25 days for every inmate. The gruesome details of inmates' experiences with the fungal disease, and the disease's long-term impact on their lives, remain largely hidden from the public's view*
*1996 media was blocked from interviewing prisoners without the prison pre selecting them
