SACRAMENTO — The battle over California prison inmates' constitutional rights has come down to this: finger-pointing over who dreamed up the idea of giving convicted criminals taxpayer-funded bingo and yoga rooms.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown have lambasted efforts by J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed overseer of prison healthcare, to spend $8 billion on a "gold-plated utopian hospital plan" for 10,000 inmates. It features a "holistic" environment with natural light and space for yoga, music, horticulture and art therapy.
On Tuesday, Kelso fired back, saying that the facilities are meant for mentally ill inmates, and that he had simply followed the state's example for treating them. The evidence? Sexual predators forced to live at Coalinga State Hospital, which opened on Schwarzenegger's watch, have access to an electronic bingo board, a state-of-the-art gymnasium with a rubberized floor, a weight room and eight landscaped atriums.
Kelso showed reporters enlarged images of the hospital from the state Department of Mental Health's website.
"They are criticizing their own treatment program," he said. "It does remind me of the poem, 'I shot an arrow up into the air, it fell to Earth I know not where.' Well, the arrow this time is falling on the state's own Coalinga State Hospital, opened by the Schwarzenegger administration in 2005."
On Tuesday, Brown said the facilities at Coalinga are not comparable to Kelso's proposal because the sexual predators had finished their prison terms and were now confined under the state's civil commitment law.
"The bar is much higher in that case, because they're being deprived of their liberty outside the criminal law," Brown said. "It's a totally separate legal situation."
He said he could not comment on whether sex offenders need a bingo board, and called Kelso's appeal to the media "unseemly" and political.
Nancy Kincaid, a spokeswoman for the Department of Mental Health, said that the Coalinga design was based on a federal court settlement on constitutional standards for treatment of the mentally ill in institutions, and that social-skill development, vocational training and physical activities dramatically reduce aggressive behavior.
The back-and-forth comes as the state chafes against court control of its prison medical care, seized in 2006 by U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson, who said the system was so poor that inmates were dying unnecessarily. Henderson also sits on a three-judge panel now weighing whether to order the state to reduce prison overcrowding.
