A First Look at Inmate Diet: The Nutrition and Violence Connection

CDCR’s regulations about inmate diets start off with a commitment to provide inmates with —

a healthy and nutritionally balanced diet, served in an orderly manner with food flavor, texture, temperature, appearance and palatability taken into consideration. Current Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), and Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) as established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science shall be considered authoritative in setting levels of nutritional need. Sanitation, safety, and food handling standards and practices shall be established and maintained in keeping with applicable requirements established by the Industrial Safety Standards (California Code of Regulations (CCR), Title 8) and the California Health and Safety Code (H&SC).

The standard menu for all institutions is a “heart healthy” low-salt, low-fat diet. All prison meals, save those served in camps, are pork free, and the regulations make allowances for vegetarian, Jewish, and recently added Muslim (“meat alternate”) meals.

This week, Emily Deans over at Evolutionary Psychiatry has posted links to several studies, conducted with double-blinds and control groups, which suggest that nutrition may play an important role in inmate violence reduction. Her first post cites two such studies, and her second post speaks of Gesch’s work in this field and his assessment that recommendations for vitamin supplements would not be heeded due to political reasons. I assume providing inmates with medication might be portrayed as “coddling” them and make for bad press, but maybe it should be considered as a public safety measure, considering its reductive effects on violence?

I’ve been trying to look at the Receivership’s organizational tree to figure out if anyone at the prison medical services did work concerned with preventative medicine, including dietary recommendations. Dear readers – if you can provide us with sample daily/weekly menus at CA institutions, or with stories on what friends or family members purchase at the canteen to supplement their meals, we’ll all know a bit more about prison nutrition.

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props to Yossi Kikayon for bringing this to my attention.

Hawai’i Inmates: It’s a Long Way Back Home

image courtesy myinmatelocator.com

Remember the horrors and corruption involved in keeping Hawai’ian inmates out of state? And David Johnson’s report on the futility of out-of-state incarceration as a recidivism reducing measure? Well, don’t hold your breath. The inmates aren’t coming home any time soon. And, of course, CCA is in the mix. The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports:

State prison officials are seeking proposals to house about 1,800 prisoners outside Hawaii after the current prison contract ends in June, despite Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s call to bring inmates back home as soon as possible.
“It is very clear at this time that we do not have all the facilities to bring the inmates back,” said Martha Torney, deputy director of administration for the state Department of Public Safety. “As the state moves toward bringing the inmates back to the islands, that will determine what our needs are in the future.”
The state already has returned some prisoners since Abercrombie said in December that he wants prisoners to stay in Hawaii.
During the quarterly rotation in January, the state brought back about 125 more prisoners than were sent to the mainland, Torney said.
The request for proposals, published March 1, designates a three-year contract, but the state can cancel the contract and remove prisoners at any time, Torney said. The submittal period ends March 31.
One company that plans on submitting an offer is Corrections Corp. of America — the fifth-largest U.S. prison operator behind the federal government, California, Florida and Texas.
Hawaii has 1,699 prisoners at CCA’s Saguaro Correctional Center and 58 inmates at CCA’s Red Rock Correctional Center, both in Eloy, Ariz., Torney said.
Brad Regens, CCA’s vice president of state partnership relations, said CCA is not lobbying to keep Hawaii’s prisoners out of state.

Beyond the obvious exasperation, I have two burning questions.

1. Does anyone actually believe Regens? Remember, these are the folks whose money and backdoor wheeling and dealing brought us the horrific and racist Arizona SB 1070.

2. Has anyone given any thought to the fact that, with Hawai’i’s low crime rates, most of these people don’t need to be in ANY prison – on the island or on the mainland – and therefore, no “facilities” need to be built? We’ve talked plenty about what California needs to learn from Hawai’i. Now, Hawai’i, learn from California’s experience: If you build it, they will come.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a Hawaiian inmate housed in the mainland, away from family and friends, keep looking. You won’t find them here.

Pelican Bay Class Action Suit, Madrid v. Gomez, Comes to an End

This week, Madrid v. Gomez, a massive class-action lawsuit on behalf of Pelican Bay inmates filed in 1995, came to an end. KQED reports:

In a sweeping decision with national implications, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco ruled in 1995 that Pelican Bay inmates had been subjected to excessive violence and cruel and unusual punishment. That followed harrowing courtroom testimony of prison staff routinely beating, burning and even shooting inmates and getting away with it. Mentally ill inmates were locked away in isolation units with almost no contact with doctors or other staff.


 The trial also included evidence that Pelican Bay guards had staged an inmate riot while Henderson was visiting the facility.


Federal prosecutors alleged the guards were trying “to show Judge Henderson that Pelican Bay is a dangerous place, and that he should not interfere with the guards in running the prison.” Henderson ordered the prison to remove any seriously mentally ill or retarded inmates from the security housing unit. He also appointed a federal monitor to oversee changes in the way California deploys force in prison and how it investigates and disciplines prison staff.


Henderson ended the case with a final three-page written order after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation pledged to keep the reforms even without court supervision. His order was made public Monday.


“The Court is proud of the work done during Advertisement the life of this case. Pelican Bay was once a place where prison officials used force ‘for the very purpose of inflicting punishment and pain,'” Henderson wrote, quoting from previous findings in the case.


The judge said he is concerned the department could revert to its previous unconstitutional practices but said he is satisfied that attorneys representing inmates will sue again if the department regresses.

And CDCR expands on the measures taken:

“CDCR has complied with the Madrid mandates and successfully created a model internal affairs investigation and employee disciplinary process. Investigations are consistent, thorough, fair and transparent. The Madrid mandates also provided oversight of employee investigations by the formation of the Bureau of Independent Review in 2004, part of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). In its last report, the OIG noted that CDCR has substantially complied with the policies and procedures mandated by the Madrid court,” Cate said.


As Michael Montgomery says in the recorded portion, the broad issue of SHU and isolation practices remains unanswered.

On a day in which I was shocked and appalled to read about SCOTUS’ rejection of Troy Davis’s appeal, this was a bit of welcome news.

Solitary Confinement: Not Just Bradley Manning

This morning, the CNN website features a piece by psychiatrist Terry Kupers from the Wright Institute regarding Wikileaks suspect Bradley Manning’s imprisonment conditions. Terry, author of Prison Madness (reviewed here by Psychiatric Services), argues that keeping Manning in solitary confinement is cruel and counterproductive to the goal of preserving Manning’s safety and sanity.

I haven’t read Prison Madness, but this excellent 2009 New Yorker article by Atul Gawande is helpful in explaining why solitary confinement is one of the cruelest forms of imprisonment. My two cents: Manning’s headline case should not be seen as exceptional. It should draw our attention to the fact that non-Wikileaking inmates are, as a matter of routine, held in solitary confinement — even if, as our pal Sara from the Prison Law Blog remarks, CDCR insist on calling it something else. In addition to the maddening conditions, I frequently receive letters from inmates complaining about the strict control over reading materials at SHU units.
When reading about the imprisonment conditions of some particular inmate or other whose issue has made the news, I find it useful to think how many unnamed, invisible folk are subjected to the same, or worse, incarceration regimes. I encourage my readers to do the same.

For-Profit Institutions: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The debate over privatized correctional institutions is, for the most part, a non-debate. Institutions owned, funded, and directed by such entities as the Corrections Corporation of America are a fact of life, and Californian inmates hare subjected to privatized out-of-state institutions as well as to privatized operations within state prisons. The jury is still out on whether private institutions produce higher or lower recidivism rates (this Florida study suggests no significant differences between private and public institutions; here’s a good lit review from the study of previous projects in the same vein). But beyond the issue of long term gains, privatized institutions provide problematic opportunities for profit making that end up in corruption. And corruption comes in many forms.

What sparked this post was a recent piece on the California Bar Journal about a Pennsylvania judge who has just been convicted by a federal jury of —
taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from the owner of for-profit juvenile detention facilities. Mark Ciavarella was convicted on 12 of 39 counts, including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and filing false tax returns. The jury also found that he must forfeit the $997,600 “finder’s fee” he received from the developers of private juvenile detention centers. Another former judge charged in the case, Michael T. Conahan, pleaded guilty to a single racketeering charge last year and is awaiting sentence.
The author, Janice Brickley, informs us of the California Commission on Judicial Performance; lawyers can submit complaints about judges, and in situations such as the Pennsylvania travesty, they should. But much as it is shocking to see a judicial officer whose neutrality is the cornerstone of justice sell off to correctional profiteers, let’s keep in mind that judges are human beings. And the absolute power provided to people – whether it’s over prison management or people’s lives – corrupts absolutely.
We’ve recently seen examples of other kinds of travesty that seems to be the by-product of privatized industries: The sexual assault of Hawai’ian inmates in a private facility in Kentucky, and the distressing complicity of Correctional Corporations of America in bringing about the racist, xenophobic, and arguably unconstitutional, SB1070 in Arizona. Why would judges be better than corporate profiteers or their employees? Why are we so surprised when they transgress, whereas we shrug at CCA’s cynical manipulation of state correctional policies to fill its institutions with inmates? I don’t know. But these sorts of incidents should provide food for thought to those who would expand the privatized empire as a measure to fight overcrowding.
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Props to dear colleague Lois Schwartz for the link.

Panel on Isolation Units

Almost once a week I receive mail from inmates or family members concerning the solitary confinement conditions at the SHU unit in Pelican Bay. We have previously blogged about the discontents of solitary confinement and behavioral modification here and here. Now, the Center for Constitutional Rights is organizing an upcoming panel about the conditions in isolation units.

Where: The Women’s Building, Audre Lorde Room, 3543 18th Street #8, San Francisco, CA
When: Tuesday, April 5, 6:30pm-8:00pm
Who:
  • Dr. Terry Kupers, M.D.
  • Alexis Agathocleous, Staff Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights
  • Zahra Baloo, Executive Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-San Francisco Bay Area
  • Keramet Reiter, JD, PhD Candidate Berkeley Law

Legislative Analyst’s Office Unhappy with Brown’s CDCR Budget

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has just issued a report critiquing Jerry Brown’s plan for the CDCR budget (which we briefly discussed just a few days ago), and it does not paint a pretty picture. LAO finds serious overbudgeting in some areas, and is deeply concerned with CDCR exceeding its budget in several areas.

General Fund support for CDCR, particularly with regard to CCPOA salaries and overtime (already on the top steps of the salary scale), appears to be excessive, and CDCR has already exceeded its authority in these matters. Among the other surprising expenditures are $55.2 million in medical transportation costs, $20.5 million in legal costs (wouldn’t it be cheaper to decrease population, which would also mean that the population decrease order would not have to be fought in court?), and $17.3 million in “empty beds” in case incarceration needs change.

The LAO report critiques the CDCR practice of notifying the legislature of budget shortfalls after the fact, thus coercing legislators to increase the budget in restrospect. Also, the budget does not take into account savings in adult parole and administration, which might mean the money could go elsewhere, where it is needed.

A particularly thorny issue is the fact that the budget assumes that CDCR will be making personnel cuts it has no intention of making absent a reduction in inmate population.

The budget, says the report, does not hold CDCR accountable regarding its expenditures, and there is no guarantee against CDCR pulling its retrospective budgeting trick again on the legislature. LAO therefore recommends that the legislature demand accountability and accuracy in the correctional budget.

Assembly Committee Critiques Receivership Spending

On today’s Chron, Marisa Lagos reports some disturbing findings from the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. Examining expenditures made by the federal receiver appointed by the court to oversee prison health care, the committee found extravagant spending with little or no effect on quality health care.

The findings, which are expected to be announced during a hearing today, show large salaries being paid to construction consultants on an abandoned project, who then turned around and charged taxpayers for housing, meals and dry cleaning. Prison health care spending has also grown by more than 65 percent since 2006, when a three-judge panel appointed the receiver after concluding that substandard medical treatment and neglect were killing one inmate per week.

Today’s public hearing will feature responses from the receivership, whose speaker explained to the Chron that —

all of the expenses paid out by the previous receiver were within federal reimbursement guidelines.

“Those contracts no longer exist, and after Clark arrived he cut back and eventually eliminated all of them,” she said.

Kincaid also noted that Kelso has made great strides toward reining in expenses. The overall death rate at prison health care centers has dropped by at least 10 percent since 2006, according to a presentation Kelso is scheduled to make to the committee today.

(Kelso recently reported continued improvements in inmate health care. Others found mixed results.)

Whether the expenses are attributable to the current or the former receivership should be an easy matter to check. What is less easy is to examine the complex connection between these developments and the overcrowding problem. It seems that both sides to the debate can use this report as ammunition for their position. As some readers may recall, one of the points made by the state in the Plata/Coleman litigation was that appointing the receiver should have been enough. Those concerned about early releases might argue that, had the receivership been more prudent in setting its priorities and spending its budget, there would be no need for the Plata/Coleman panel to order the population reduction. The counterargument, made by Don Specter in the newspaper article, is that regardless of how the receivership spends its money, as long as prisons are overcrowded no construction projects or expensive consultants will be able to improve the quality of health care behind bars.

Building Our Way Out of Overcrowding?

Re our posts here, here and here: Yesterday’s Chron offered a summary of CDCR’s progress on construction projects funded by AB900. Four years after authorizing $7.4 billion dollars in bonds, “the state has not completed a single project authorized by that bill, AB900, and has begun planning or construction for only about 8,400 beds” for the 8,200 inmates currently still sleeping in “bad beds”.

The piece quotes some critics of the construction path for decrowding, and it was pleasant to see the CCPOA among them.

Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he believes the state should undertake a “serious review” of AB900, noting that lawmakers have instituted other reforms to deal with crowding since 2007 – including medical parole for severely incapacitated inmates – and that the state’s crime rate has declined.

Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the prison guards union, which opposed AB900, said the construction authorized by the bill will not solve the state’s prison crisis.

I still think, as I pointed out in another post, that despite the open-ended order in Plata/Coleman, it is completely possible to offer an entirely reasonable interpretation of the order, according to which construction projects are not an acceptable response to overcrowding. In fact, the opposite interpretation seems unreasonable to me. The order specifically provided a number of inmates to be released from prison, not an acceptable square yardage. I believe that attempting to build out way out of overcrowding is not only unsound, but also a violation of the court’s order.

More on Plata/Coleman Oral Arguments

A few more details on the oral arguments for the benefit of our readers:

The State’s case, presented by Carter Phillips, started with strong statements regarding the receiver, and how his appointment and deeds were remedy enough. Phillips caught much flak on this from Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, who pointed out that the receiver himself declared several times that his efforts at improvement would be futile without a decrease in population.

Justice Sotomayor left little doubt as to where she stood on the state’s failure to provide care (and generated some rudeness from Justice Scalia):

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So when are you going to get to that? When are you going to avoid the needless deaths that were reported in this record? When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state? When are you going to get to a point where you are going to deliver care that is going to be adequate?
Your Honor.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Don’t be rhetorical.
MR. PHILLIPS: I’ll do my best. Thank you, your Honor.

Justice Kennedy, who as many commentators said is key in this case, seemed to accept the idea that overcrowding is the cause for the medical crisis.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Overcrowding is the principal — overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy. The Court can’t — has to at some point focus on the remedy, and that’s what it did, and that it seems to me was a perfectly reasonable decision.

And elsewhere:

But I think it means that overcrowding must not be ordered unless that is the only efficacious remedy in — in a permissible period of time. And it seems to me there is massive expert testimony to support that proposition on the part of the prisoners.

Justice Breyer also seemed to be sympathetic to the appellees, from a pragmatic standpoint:

I mean, I read the newspaper. It doesn’t seem to me California has been voting a lot of money for new programs. The — the — what is it — what is it specifically that would happen that would cure this problem were we to say — I mean, a big human rights problem — what would we say — what would happen if we were to say, no, this panel’s wrong? What would happen that would cure the problem?

Justice Kagan highlighted the main problems with judicial review – to some extent providing support for the original three-judge panel and its dedication:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr. Phillips, my trouble listening to you is that it seems as though you are asking us to re-find facts. You know, you have these judges who have been involved in these cases since the beginning, for 20 years in the Plata case, who thought we’ve done everything we can, the receiver has done everything he can; this just isn’t going anywhere and it won’t go anywhere until we can address this root cause of the problem. And that was the view of the judges who had been closest to the cases from the beginning and the view of the three-judge court generally. So how can we reach a result essentially without, you know, re-finding the facts that they have been dealing with for 20 years?

Phillips: there have been big developments, but the state itself limited discovery from 2008 onward.

Phillips also distinguished the medical from the mental health problems. The Coleman problem, as he stated, was worse; and he said,

if the Court were to conclude ultimately that Coleman ought to go back for another analysis based on the problems there, I could understand that. And it would be a very different prisoner release order under those circumstances because then you would have to take out all of the evidence with respect to Plata and let that play out.

Questions to Don Specter, arguing for the appellees, focused on the fact that the “cutoff date” was 2008 and things may have vastly improved since then, as well as on the percentage of reduction.

By contrast to Justice Kennedy, Justice Alito expressed his opinion that there was a disconnect between overcrowding and medical care.

You could have a prison where the — the cells themselves are crowded, and yet there are other facilities available for medical care and plenty of staff to attend to those things. So what’s the connection?

He then pressed Specter to reflect on the fact that the released inmates are not necessarily of the class that is arguably compromised. Specter explained that population reduction could be done by a variety of ways, conceding that transferring inmates out of state is one possible way. (not talking about overcrowding in itself as making the operations difficult).

Justice Roberts seemed to lean toward a 145% capacity solution and pressed

The other issue on which Specter had to answer questions had to do with the public safety angle. Note the Justices’ shock at the California recidivism rates. They must truly be disconnected from the world they live in. I found this exchange particularly illuminating, and to be honest and personal, quite distressing.

JUSTICE ALITO: In general, what is the recidivism rate?
MR. SPECTER: Well, overall, the risk is around 70 percent, but for low-risk prisoners the risk is 17 percent who reviolate.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. I couldn’t — what was the first -­
MR. SPECTER: The first number when you take all parolees, all together, it’s 70 percent.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: 7-0?
MR. SPECTER: 7-0, because — within three years. That’s what — the situation we have now, and that’s the situation that the governor, the secretary,and the court described as a failure. With parole reform you could reduce that number in many ways, and the Court described how you could do that. But the lowest –
JUSTICE ALITO: What is the lowest? It’s 17 percent.
MR. SPECTER: 17 percent, and California has a risk assessment instrument which the Court found – which the Court found could be used to make sure that what happened in Philadelphia doesn’t happen again. If I understand it -­
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I understood that of the low-risk — if only the low-risk people are released, around 3,000 of them are going to commit another crime.
MR. SPECTER: They — but they don’t have to be released, first off. I want to make sure I emphasize the point that this is a crowding reduction measure. You don’t have to release 30,000 prisoners.
JUSTICE ALITO: They don’t have to be released if you can build enough cells -­
MR. SPECTER: Or you can divert, or you can improve the parole system so that parole violators don’t commit so many crimes. If you offer rehabilitation alternatives, if you provide a number of diversion into the community, there are a number of options short of releasing prisoners. And the 70 percent figure concludes -­
JUSTICE ALITO: The 17 percent figure goes exactly to my concern. This is going to have — it seems likely this is going to have an effect on public safety. And the experts can testify to whatever they want, but you know what? If this order goes into effect, we will see. We will see, and the people of California will see. Are there more crimes or are there not?
MR. SPECTER: Well, if it’s based on the experience in other jurisdictions, the court found we wouldn’t. And I wanted to say — to clarify one point, Your Honor: The 70 percent figure includes — doesn’t always include crimes. It includes lots of technical parole violators. People who have missed their appointments, for example. So it’s not as grave as some of the figures that are informed by the other side.

In rebuttal, Justice Kagan pressured phillips on whether the state could safely reduce population within five years.

My impression, overall, is that many of the Justices already have their minds made up, and that the oral arguments might have done little beyond furnishing them with ammunition for writing the decision. The big mystery, as Rory pointed out yesterday, is whether Justice Kennedy, who seems to see the causal connection between overcrowding and abysmal health care, will also approve of the remedy.