Since mid-2005, shortly before the receiver's office was established, 65 prison doctors have been fired or left the system, and 33 are practicing on a restricted basis pending completion of an investigation. The receivership hired 172 doctors, nearly half the number it is authorized to have, between Aug. 1, 2007, and July 31, along with hundreds of nurses.
Joan Petersilia, a criminologist who studies prisons at UC Irvine, said she believes a number of factors might be at work, not all of them connected to the receiver's staff. She said the state had been more frequently segregating gang members and other disruptive prisoners from the rest of the inmate population, which could bring down the number of deaths related to violence.
Prisoners with mental illnesses are also getting their medications more regularly and more often are being isolated from other inmates, she said.
"The inmates sometimes tell me that they feel safer now because they do notice that gang members are being extracted," she said. "That may have something to do with it. It's hard to know what to make of it, but for me, any good sign is a good sign because we see so many trends going in the opposite direction."
The number of lockdowns -- in which inmates are confined to their cells almost exclusively -- could also be contributing to the decrease in deaths, because it tends to reduce violence among inmates. The state has increased lockdowns in the last two years, Petersilia said.
In his report to Henderson, Kelso said the reduction might be seized upon by state officials "who allowed horrific prison conditions to fester" as evidence that his office is no longer needed, and that his efforts to obtain $8 billion for construction of medical facilities might now be derided as unnecessary.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Kelso wrote, saying the reduction in deaths demonstrates only "preliminary results, not that the work is complete."
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michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
