December 10, 2010
Viewpoints: Time to split up corrections department
As noted in my op-ed in September, the receivership has made substantial progress in turning around prison medical care and controlling costs, and to finish the job, we need to spin off prison health care from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation so that health care can receive appropriate attention by a separate organization devoted to health care. The corrections department's mission is not health care; it is confinement.
Spinning off health care is only part of the solution to fixing our correctional system. Health care is not the only function that has been struggling. As of today, the "R" in CDCR exists in name only since rehabilitation programs have been decimated by budget cuts. The parole system has seen repeated failures, and even at its best, is woefully under-resourced. The juvenile program functions under the watchful eye of a state court judge.
The department has become impossible to manage given the huge scope of its operations, the unrelenting overcrowding, and the tension between day-to-day operational improvement and crisis management driven by periodic bad headlines. It is time to reorganize CDCR into smaller organizational pieces to improve focus on discrete functions and to strengthen transparency and accountability for operations...
LINK - SacBee.com
