Report Outlines Abuses by California Prison Staff

English: Image is similar, if not identical, to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation patch. Made with Photoshop. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A California parole agent was accused of soliciting one of his parolees
to kill another. Numerous corrections department employees allegedly had
sex with inmates, including juveniles.

And a prison guard was suspected of carousing regularly with prisoners,
even joining them as they drank a form of booze the inmates manufactured
themselves.

The incidents are among 278 cases of alleged employee misconduct
detailed in the latest report by the independent inspector general of
the state corrections department.

The abuses highlighted in the reports produced every six months raise
questions about how effectively the state prison system hires and
polices its sworn peace officers.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has promised to better follow existing policies and procedures.

But a top prison official said no dramatic policy or training changes are planned as a result of the reports.

“We’re pretty comfortable or satisfied with the level of screening or
prevention that we do already in the department. We have a pretty high
bar as it is,” said Martin Hoshino, acting undersecretary for
operations.

The department has improved since the days when officers were found to
have encouraged inmates to engage in what were known as “gladiator
fights” or developed a code of silence to protect officers who broke the
rules, he said.

“Do we have examples of misconduct? Sure, but I think that’s true for any large organization,” Hoshino said.

The union representing prisons guards did not respond to a request for
comment Wednesday on the report, which details cases that were closed
during the second half of 2012.

In his previous report in October, the inspector general criticized the
corrections department’s Southern California internal affairs office for
doing a particularly poor job of investigating and prosecuting such
complaints.

That region still has the worst record, with nearly a third of allegations handled improperly.

However, many of the allegations of employee abuse predate the
department’s most recent promises about following its existing rules.

Inspector General Robert Barton says in the latest report that he is optimistic the record will improve.

Details such as where the incidents occurred or what happened to the
employees involved are scarce because the inspector general’s role is to
evaluate whether the department property investigated the reported
malfeasance.

The inspector general’s office selected the most egregious cases from
among 1,074 incidents investigated by the department’s internal affairs
office.

In one case, a prison guard allegedly stripped off his duty weapons to
duke it out with an inmate, then encouraged other guards to cover up the
fight.

Among the allegations of improper sexual relations was a case involving a
year-long series of complaints that a high-ranking official at a
juvenile facility repeatedly fondled two wards, had sexual skin-to-skin
contact with another ward, and watched wards engaging in sexual acts.

The department outlined similar behavior in its report last fall,
including the case of one prison employee accused of bearing an inmate’s
child and another who purportedly sent nude photos of herself to an
inmate’s contraband cellphone.

Overall, nearly half the allegations in the most recent report involved
neglect of duty or dishonesty, while 8 percent alleged unreasonable use
of force.

Sexual misconduct was alleged in 2 percent of the reports, 9 percent
involved overfamiliarity with inmates, and 5 percent detailed
trafficking of contraband — often cellphones that have become a major
security risk behind bars.

By DON THOMPSON

Associated Press

Link to article

 

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Land of the Free??

EDITORIAL: California prisons still need reform, improvement

Gov. Jerry Brown may declare the state’s prison crisis over, but legislators still have plenty to do to ensure a functional corrections system. 

Via @ THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

Declaring victory is not the same as actually achieving it. The governor might say the state’s prison crisis is over, but the real test will be whether the court agrees. Even then, legislators need to tackle the state’s incoherent sentencing scheme and ensure that the complex corrections realignment plan succeeds.

Gov. Jerry Brown last week said the state’s prison crisis was over and demanded that the federal court return control of California prisons to the state. The administration also filed legal papers seeking to end court intervention in the state’s corrections system.

California has struggled for years to deal with prison ills. A federal judge seized control of inmate health care in 2005, after the state promised, but failed, to improve a system rife with neglect and substandard care. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an emergency in 2006 because the state’s 33 prisons were crowded to nearly twice their intended capacity. A panel of three federal judges in 2009 ordered the state to reduce the prison population, then at about 148,000, to 110,000.

Whether federal judges will lift a population cap the state has yet to meet — state prisons now contain about 119,000 inmates — is a big question. The state’s long record of irresponsibility on prison issues offers little reason for judges to trust California’s promises of reform. And the changes the state has made happened mainly because of court intervention.

But despite clear progress in fixing parole, boosting inmate health care and easing crowded conditions, legislators still have much to do to ensure a functional corrections system. Legislators should, for example, revise criminal sentencing laws that are chaotic and arbitrary. Sentences for similar crimes can vary wildly for no discernible reason. Politicians and voters have created longer criminal sentences in haphazard fashion, with no thought to any coherent approach to punishment or any consideration of the state’s prison capacity.

Continue Reading here

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Ammiano to Introduce Sweeping Prison Reform Legislation

By Dan Aiello

In the wake of California’s election last month where voters passed two propositions aimed at reducing the number of inmates in California’s overcrowded prison system, the State Assembly’s Safety Committee Chair says he will introduce major prison reform this session targeting a correctional system failure rate that persists as the highest recidivism rate in the nation.

“With voters approving both propositions 30 and 36, I believe we are in a position to achieve significant prison reform to reduce our failure rate and begin decreasing our prison population,” San Francisco Democrat Assembly member Tom Ammiano told the California Progress Report recently.

Continue Reading @ Examiner.com

 

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California: To cut state prison budget, start with perks for guards

By Arthur B. Laffer

 

California’s voters will soon consider two ballot initiatives that aim to reduce the state’s unsustainable spending on prisons. The cost of jail is punishing – and not just for the prisoners. Incarcerating an inmate runs an average of $47,000 a year.

That figure certainly is not chump change, but the folks behind bars are not the reason that the finances for California’s prison system are falling apart. Rather, the state’s unionized prison guards – specifically, their excessively generous pay and benefits – are to blame. Reforming the Golden State’s broke – and broken – correctional system should start by taking on the prison guards.

The crisis in California’s prisons was cast into stark relief last year when the U.S. Supreme Court found that the state was violating the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The high court ordered the state to release tens of thousands of prisoners or find another way to ease overcrowding in order to prevent “needless suffering and death.”

It’s not as if the prison system lacks sufficient funds. Roughly 10 percent of the state’s general fund – or about $9 billion a year – is devoted to Corrections and Rehabilitation expenditures. And California doesn’t just spend a lot on its prison system in aggregate; California’s per-capita prison costs are also 54 percent higher than the national average.

How could California spend top dollar on its prisons – and yet still subject inmates to inhumane living conditions?

Six-figure salaries for some prison guards provide a big chunk of the answer. Cadets at the prison-guard academy make about $3,000 a month. Once they get out, they can look forward to starting base salaries of up to $65,000. Prison guards get time-and-a-half whenever they clock in more than 40 hours a week. According to columnist Allysia Finley, one sergeant collected more than $200,000 in salary, overtime and bonus in 2010. And his income wasn’t even tops among his peers.

Guards can retire at the relatively young age of 55 – and receive 85 percent of their final year’s salary.

Continue Reading @ The Sac Bee

 

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Arizona prisons can be deadly for sick: 5 inmate deaths tied to delays, lack of care

Arizona Department of Corrections (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Bob Ortega
The Republic | azcentral.com

For two years, Ferdinand Dix repeatedly filed requests with Arizona’s Tucson state prison staff, asking to be examined for a chronic cough, shortness of breath and loss of appetite.

When Dix, who was serving five years on forgery and drug charges, finally received a checkup, the doctor didn’t notice cancer had caused his liver to swell to four times its normal size. He told Dix to drink energy shakes.

It wasn’t until he was “nonresponsive” and had been transported to an outside hospital that Dix was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer. He died a few days later, on Feb. 11. He was 47.

Arizona prison inmate deaths

Dix’s case is cited in a federal lawsuit accusing the Arizona Department of Corrections of medical neglect. It’s a charge the system has faced before, from activists, inmates’ families and at least one Arizona lawmaker.

Citing the litigation, Corrections officials declined to discuss Dix’s care.

A review by The Arizona Republic of deaths in state prisons over the past two fiscal years found at least four inmates, in addition to Dix, whose medical care was delayed or potentially inadequate leading up to their deaths. The records of these cases, together with interviews of officers, medical staff and inmates point to a system in which correctional officers routinely deny inmates access to timely care, and in which treatment sometimes falls short of accepted standards.

These deaths are among dozens of examples of preventable deaths uncovered in a broad investigation by The Republic into high rates of suicide, homicide and accidental deaths in state prisons.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan denies that health care in Arizona’s prisons is inadequate or that there is an institutional indifference toward ailing inmates.

But Corrections officials do acknowledge that a long-planned privatization of prison medical care has made it difficult to fill vacancies. They also say care has been hobbled for more than a year by cuts to outside contractor payments, which state lawmakers imposed two years ago.

Allegations of substandard care, however, predate those developments. For example, the suit in which Dix is named — filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison Law Office of San Quentin, Calif., — lists dozens of allegations of inmates waiting months for medicine or medical treatment, and suffering permanent damage and disfigurement as a result.

“Our correctional health care is shocking; it’s unacceptable,” Rep. Cecil Ash, a Mesa Republican, told his fellow lawmakers last year.

Ash warned that providing inadequate care not only harmed inmates, it also exposed the state to costly lawsuits. His effort to fund improved care for prisoners garnered little support in the Legislature.

“They’re out of sight, out of mind. And they don’t vote,” he said of inmates.

There is also a general lack of public sympathy for prisoners, particularly those who have committed heinous crimes.

Take Carey Wheatley, a convicted child molester serving a life term. He was 49 when he died of pneumonia on April 24, 2011, while in solitary confinement at the Florence state prison. For days leading up to his death, nurses offered him only the pain reliever acetaminophen, according to the Pinal County medical examiner’s report.

Medical experts say antibiotics or antivirals are the standard course of treatment for bronchial pneumonia.

When Daniel Porter, who shot to death two clerks at a Circle K store in Tucson in 1986, was sentenced in 1992 to life on two murder charges, he begged to be put to death. But the Superior Court judge ruled that the murders were the result of mental illness — paranoid schizophrenia — which caused Porter to believe the clerks were trying to poison him. He also noted that Porter had been beaten and sexually abused as a child by his father and stepfather, and had been in and out of mental hospitals beginning when he was 13.

When Porter died, it was the result of hyponatremia, a chronic sodium deficiency that causes excessive thirst. Porter drank gallon after gallon of water for days, while correctional officers yelled at him to stop drinking or occasionally hit him with pepper spray, according to a report by Corrections investigators. He died in solitary confinement at Eyman state prison on Feb. 20, having literally drunk himself to death with water. Corrections officials listed his death as “accidental.”

“His sodium deficiency was well documented,” said Porter’s sister, Elaine Faith. “That he was allowed to go two, three days drinking that much water and they knew about it and didn’t take him in because he needed IV therapy.”

“I know nothing can bring my brother back, but prisoners deserve at least humane medical treatment,” Faith said.

Continue Reading @ AZCentral.com

 

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How the Hunger Strike Started for Me

By Alfred Sandoval

The Pelican Bay warden opened the doors of the prison to a media tour on Aug. 17, following the first phase of the hunger strike, as wardens have in the past whenever the prison fell under public attention. A few mainstream reporters were escorted to a few parts of the prison, though not where the prisoners who organized the strike are housed, and they were prohibited from speaking with prisoners. They were told that this prisoner had decided to “debrief.”

 

Photo by Julie Small, KPPC

I’ve been in the SHU  (Solitary Confinement) since July of 1987 so I’ve lived through a lot of physical as well as psychological abuses. I was originally placed in SHU at San Quentin’s Adjustment Center. The first thing I noticed as I was being escorted past the sergeant’s office was a caricature of a boar hog dressed in a correctional officer’s uniform holding a noose with a hammer hanging from it posted on the wall. So, being Mexican, I knew what time it was. Slowly, the blatant racism was pushed into the politically correct broom closet but it’s never been thrown out.

 

In 2003, I was returned from court to Pelican Bay and told in no uncertain terms that I would die here.

 

When PBSP created the control unit – known as the short corridor – in early 2006, the goal of the Office of Correctional Safety (OCS) was made perfectly clear: Debrief or die! They implemented orders to the short corridor correctional officer (C/O) staff to apply pressure to targeted prisoners, and the gang unit (Institutional Gang Investigations, or IGI) became the overseers of the control unit and began to target prisoners’ families and friends and attempt to create discord by mixing up mail, withholding and delaying personal mail and restricting visits for as little as saying hello to another prisoner. Their goal is to isolate these targeted prisoners.

 

I had never believed in hunger strikes, thinking that they’re counter-productive. However, when the gang unit began to work in concert with the chief medical officer – the IGI actually decides the level of medical treatment prisoners in the short corridor receive – I decided to participate in this and the next hunger strike, but here’s why:

 

A few years ago, a close friend – his name was Jimmy – developed cancer. The medical staff, MTAs and RNs, explained that if he’d debrief, become an informant, he would receive better medical care. Now Jimmy and I had known each other since we were teenagers running the streets of East Los Angeles getting high and living the lifestyle that ended up with both of us in prison for life.

 

As Jimmy’s cancer grew worse, he began chemotherapy. Jimmy mentioned to me how the IGI would “show up” at the clinic and comment that he could have contact visits with his wife before he died if he’d debrief. He refused but that’s how he found out the cancer was terminal! Jimmy loved his wife more than anything and he wouldn’t tell her everything about the head games and bullshit like waking up from surgery still under anesthesia being questioned by IGI, but I had warned him of that because it happened to me and at least three other prisoners.

 

After one of the surgeries, Jimmy was returned to his cell after a brief stay at the Pelican Bay prison infirmary. Those cells are completely bare except for a bed and all you can do is lay there and wait. On the second night back in his cell, he awoke to a bad pain. He said it was a little after 2 a.m. and the staples had opened along his abdomen and he was bleeding. He was holding his intestines in, calling for the C/O. The C/O came and saw the blood and said he’d call the RN on duty.

 

The C/O came back approximately 30 minutes later with a roll of toilet paper. Jimmy was sitting on the blood-covered cement floor holding a towel soaked in blood against his stomach. The cop tossed Jimmy the toilet paper and said the medical staff would not come until the next shift and there was nothing he could do. Jimmy held his stomach closed in pain until almost 6 a.m. when the medical finally came and they rushed him to the hospital. He asked that I keep it to myself because that was his style.

 

I was pissed! He had requested two hardship transfers to Corcoran because of its medical facility and he’d be able to see his wife and family more before he died. Both were denied and he was told to debrief and then he’d be transferred but he steadfastly refused. The cancer spread and the gang unit increased the head games, telling the medical staff to confiscate his shaded prescription glasses. But luckily, a Dr. Williams stepped in and told the medical staff to leave Jimmy alone as he was at end stage cancer. Jimmy chose to stop the chemotherapy and die. We’d talk through a steel door and discuss everything and nothing and plan out his funeral. He died in December of 2010 and I am proud and honored to have been his friend.

 

Shortly after Jimmy’s death, I was told that approximately eight of the older prisoners had been approved for transfer to the SHU medical facility at New Folsom, but the gang unit had those transfers stopped citing that those prisoners, all in their 60s and 70s, had not successfully completed the debriefing, thereby issuing a death sentence to all of these prisoners and denying adequate medical care.

 

I am 53 years old with incurable illnesses, Hep-C and Crohn’s disease, so I am participating in the hunger strike to expose how prisoners are being mistreated and medical treatment withheld as a coercion tactic.

 

The abuses, physical and psychological, the intimidations and harassments have a very well documented history here at Pelican Bay State Prison. They should speak for themselves.

• Early 1990: Rumors of abuses at PBSP SHU come to light. The prison opens doors to media tour.
• 1995: Rumors of abuses citing C/Os extracting prisoners from their cells, stripping them naked and leaving them hogtied in the cold cells and on the cement yard overnight. Prison opens doors to media tours.
• 1998: C/Os accused of setting up inmates, opening cell doors in SHU.
• 2001: Prisoners began hunger strike to change debriefing process as it was not legal! Promises were made, Castillo case settled and reworded to be used against prisoners. Prison opens doors to media tours.
• 2006: California Inspector General’s Office issues memo for media release citing their investigation exposed that the PBSP internal affairs would avoid finding staff misconduct on excessive use of force and that some changes had been made but more are needed.

 

During this hunger strike, prisoners have been threatened with “progressive discipline,” which means the prisoners’ property will be taken out of the cells and they will only be allowed a pair of shower shoes and a pair of underwear until the administration deems the prisoner as “programming.”

The warden had a staff meeting before the last hunger strike telling staff that he would ignore the hunger strikers, which he did, violating the CDCR regulations and allowing prisoners to become ill. Grievances were returned unprocessed, so it never happened.

 

That is Pelican Bay State Prison. So now you know why I participate in the hunger strike.

 

Send our brother some love and light: Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, Pelican Bay State Prison, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

 

Re-printed from San Francisco Bay News and with the permission of Alfred Sandoval.  

Postscript from Alfred:

Right now there are three prisoners here of whom one has less than a month to live, he has terminal cancer, another has end stage liver failure due to Hepatitis C, the other has leukemia.  All are in their 50s and have been in the SHU for the majority of their lives so for all of the exposure of the hunger strike nothing has changed.

The Ten Most Significant Criminal Justice Stories of 2011

Via The Crime Report
What we want to celebrate and take note of—more than anything else—are developments in criminal justice policy, practice and theory that challenge preconceptions and break new ground; and that are worth following up in 2012.

Lists are inevitably subjective. Your list may be different from ours—and that’s fine. We want to hear your comments, suggestions, ideas—and criticism.

Some of our choices cover ideas and approaches begun years before–but for one reason or another showed special promise or produced interesting and replicable results in 2011. Many of the programs that attracted headlines or commentary this year in fact had their roots in the paradigm-busting ideas of a few hardy thinkers as much as a decade ago.

The usual critique is that change in our criminal justice systems happens, for the most part, grudgingly.

But it can happen. Below are some examples that prove the point.

One final note, which we can’t over-emphasize: this list includes notable accomplishments on both the left and the right of the spectrum: we honor both the Right on Crime movement begun by conservatives and new civil rights activism by Eric Holder’s Justice Department—underlining The Crime Report’s rigorous non-partisanship.

 

1.Right on Crime

Corrections spending has expanded to become the second fastest growing area of state budgets—railing only Medicaid. So in one of the most surprising developments of 2011, a group of conservative thinkers decided to do something about it. In just a little more than one year since the group, Right on Crime, has been formed, it has gathered an impressive list of national signatories, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Edwin Meese and current GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

Their priorities this year have included: fighting over-criminalization, consolidating partly empty prisons and prison diversion programs, among others.

Props to Right on Crime for working on the underlying issues of criminal justice reform and not just calling for more tough-on-crime measures.

–Cara Tabachnick

2.Eyewitness ID

Concerns about the reliability of eyewitness identification have preoccupied legal experts for decades. On August 24, the New Jersey Supreme Court provided a major impetus towards changing the way eyewitness evidence is used in criminal cases, with a ruling that provides judges with a new set of ground rules. Citing a “troubling lack of reliability” in such evidence, Chief Justice Stuart J. Rabner, writing for the majority, declared, “From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real.”

New Jersey judges from now on must look at nearly a dozen factors that could affect credibility, ranging from how long a time the witness observed the event to whether the witness was identifying someone of a different race. Although the ruling applies only in New Jersey, the national impact could be significant. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue (for the first time since 1977). A ruling is expected by next spring. However the ruling goes, longtime advocates of re-thinking eyewitness identification such as the Innocence Project believe that the New Jersey ruling was a landmark step towards accepting scientific research that shows memories are as subject to “contamination’ as any physical evidence.

“Human memory does not operate as a videotape,” wrote TCR blogger and forensic expert James Doyle this year. “It is not stored in a reliable state and available for replay when needed.Specific memories are easy to contaminate, and the contamination (when it occurs) is hard to identify.”

—Stephen Handelman

Continue reading…..

For Many Women, a Prison Sentence Also Means Abuse

By Amanda Wilson

 

 

The cell in a women’s prison. Credit:Courtesy of BeyondMedia

While most of the one million women in prison in the U.S. are incarcerated for non-violent offences, many experience harsh treatment that advocates say violates their human rights.

For example, the shackling of women prisoners’ arms and legs during labour and childbirth remains a common practice in many states, according to human rights organisations. Only 14 states prohibit the shackling of women when they’re giving birth.

But shackling is not the only treatment that defines many women’s experiences in prison in the U.S. One study found that 2.1 percent of female inmates experienced sexual misconduct by a staff member during a 10-month period, and advocates believe the real number could be much greater.

Tuesday is the twelfth day of the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence“, a campaign organised by Rutgers University, and one of the themes of this year’s campaign is “sexual and gender-based violence committed by state agents”.

In the U.S., organisations looking at the issue maintain that violence against women in prison is so endemic that women, who many times suffer sexual abuse and battery in their own lives before entering prison, are being revictimised en masse through systemic violence.

In a report released in June, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women highlighted “high incidents of verbal abuse and general mistreatment by both male and female guards, particularly by younger staff who are new”.

The U.N. report also highlights inadequate health care for female inmates and mental distress caused by “the continued parctice of cross-gender supervision and searches, the frequent lockdowns, the isolation of inmates, and the general agressive climate and verbal abuse prevalent within the facilities.”

Joanne Archibald is the associate director of the BeyondMedia Project, a Chicago-based media activism organisation behind the Womenandprison.org blog featuring the personal stories of women in prison.

She pointed out that while strip searches are carried out by same- gendered guards, male prison guards in the U.S. typically do have access to women prisoners’ living quarters, can do searches at any time, and carry out pat-downs.

Archibald believes the statistics on staff sexual victimisation in prison could be higher than official statistics reflect, as many women don’t speak up out of fear of reciprocity. If they report abuse, women also could also face the prospect of solitary confinement while investigations are carried out.

“Most people just suck it up and think ‘okay, I am going to get out of here some day’,” Archibald told IPS.

A cycle of abuse

From sexual violence to strip searches, such experiences can be devastating, especially for women in prison who have a history as victims of abuse in the past. Government reports say around 40 percent of women prisoners have a history of physical or sexual abuse, but other researchers report much higher numbers.

The blog features the story of Lydia, a 56-year-old Florida woman who was sentenced to life without parole in prison for the murder of her abusive ex-husband. The then-governor granted her clemency in 1998, but he died just a few days later and his successor didn’t honour the executive order that would have set Lydia free. She is still behind bars.

And there are other stories, such as those of women who are incarcerated for non-violent offences, such as drug-related offences, often without adequate drug treatment programmes or health care.

“If you were molested at age five, you learn to take care of yourself by getting high,” Archibald told IPS. “That starts the cycle. And prison is not really the way to end that cycle for most people.”

For women who have experienced abuse, even pat-downs can trigger flashbacks, Archibald said. She said the often punishing atmosphere of prison life resembles, in many ways, the abuse that many women in prison experienced in their own lives before being incarcerated.

“Part of being abused is learning helplessness, that you don’t have right to speak out about it, and that this is what you deserve – that is reinforced in what they experience every day” in prison, Archibald told IPS. “When they talk about signs of an abusive relationship – ignoring what you think, blaming you for your own problems – it is very similar to what you experience in prison.”

Continue Reading @ IPS News

California prison psychiatrist earns $838.706 a year

California governor’s salary in contrast is only $173,987

A chief psychiatrist at one of California’s overcrowded prisons was paid more than any other state employee in 2010. According to payroll figures, the unnamed physician had a salary range of $261,408 to $308,640 and collected a total of $838,706. According to data released by Controller John Chiang, the salary total included bonuses or payout of unused vacation time or sick days.

 

Figures revealed that the 10 highest-paid state employees each earned more than $500,000 in the 2010 calendar year. California Governor Jerry Brown’s salary in comparison is only $173,987. Seven of the top 10 were prison doctors or dentists.

“Governor Brown is concerned about high salaries and payouts, which are driven by a number of things, including court mandates, accrued vacation time and the last administration’s furlough program,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Ashford said in a statement. “We are looking closely at why some individuals receive such extraordinary sums.”

The nation’s largest correctional system operates at 75 percent above its rated capacity with 163,000 inmates. California is now developing a plan to reduce the population without having to release dangerous felons.

A reason explaining the exorbitant salary as commanded by prison psychiatrists, doctors and dentists can be explained by a July 1 job posting by the State Personnel Board. The salary is as much as $25,720 a month.

“Administering psychiatric care and administering dental care, when done properly, is crucial,” a corrections spokesman, Paul Verke says. He said the department wasn’t able to identify the psychiatrist from the controller’s data.

Continue Reading @ Catholic Online