SACRAMENTO — In a proposal that would nearly double the state's prison construction program, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration asked lawmakers Friday to approve $7 billion in new spending to bring medical and mental healthcare in California prisons up to constitutional standards.
The plan, to be overseen by a court-appointed federal receiver, would result in the construction of seven facilities by the middle of 2013 to house 10,000 chronically sick or mentally ill inmates, many of them elderly, who are now in traditional cells or dormitories. It would also entail improvements to existing healthcare facilities at the prisons.
That spending, almost all of which would require borrowing to be authorized by state lawmakers -- although not voters -- nearly triples the $2.5 billion the governor proposed for new medical facilities in his budget submitted to lawmakers in January.
Since then, new receiver J. Clark Kelso has surveyed the system of care in the prisons and formulated a three- to five-year plan to fix the problems, including medical facilities that he wrote were "in an abysmal state of disrepair." The system would then return to the control of state officials.
"In order to complete this in five years, I want to ask for all of what I think is the required money, upfront, once," he said Friday.
Kelso, who is scheduled to testify about his plans before a state Senate committee Monday, could seek approval from a federal judge to go forward if legislators balk.
"I'll deal with that issue if it arises," he said.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who created the receivership in 2005 and is on a three-judge panel that is weighing whether to cap the prison population, has called the system so broken that an inmate was dying every six or seven days from poor care.
The new proposal would bring the proposed cost of the state's prison construction plans to $14.7 billion. Tens of thousands of beds would be added under one plan that the governor and lawmakers approved last year but that has been delayed.
H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state Department of Finance, said the spending is mandatory because the federal courts have demanded a remedy. "We have to accomplish this," he said. "We are having to catch up for years in which this was not adequately financed."
