Opponents in prisoner mental care case disagree on a solution

The opposing sides in a decades-long battle over prisoner mental health care introduced very different responses this week about how to fix data collection and reporting at the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation.

The opposing briefs were filed almost two weeks after U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller blasted prison officials during an Oct. 23 court hearing in Coleman v. Newsom, 90CV00520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990).

Mueller's comments came after several days of hearings prompted by the 2018 release of a whistleblower report by Dr. Michael Golding, the agency's chief psychiatrist. He warned corrections officials were misrepresenting how often prisoners were being seen and distorting other metrics with the goal of misleading special masters overseeing improvements. In that hearing, Mueller emphasized how long the case has been going on and that the plaintiffs, representing a class of prisoners, had been prepared to agree to cuts in the number of psychiatrists the agency was required to employ. She repeatedly said the defense tried to "mislead" the court.

"Needless to say, the plaintiffs' acceptance was withdrawn, and plaintiffs to this day have made clear their trust has not been restored," Mueller said, according to a transcript.

Mueller went on to call out a key factor identified by the plaintiffs: a unilateral decision to redefine the term "monthly" from 30 days to 45 that was not communicated to the court. This allowed officials to overstate compliance with court-ordered standards for prisoner care, the judge said.

She went on to express sympathy for the situation corrections officials find themselves in.

"If there is a transformational and realistic alternative to the prison as de facto mental health hospital, this court is all ears," she said. "At the same time, I'm not a dreamer."

The briefs filed by each side on Tuesday came in response to Mueller's demand for an overhaul in how mental health data was gathered and shared. Under previous court-ordered terms in the case, the agency must regularly provide updates on patient wait times, mental health staff vacancies and other metrics.

The brief filed by Attorney General Xavier Becerra was largely a plea to allow more time to implement changes.

"Given the exceptionally large number of data points and the open questions regarding the methodology used to report data, Defendants urge the court to provide the parties time to work with the special master to develop a certification system," the brief argued.

It went on to warn a rushed process could lead to "an over broad, poorly conceived, and premature rule" that would need to be revisited "in the future to correct unintended consequences." It stated the agency had been identifying problems with data gathering but said it was impossible to "certify individual data entries as accurate" given the number of staff who input it across its vast workforce.

The brief, filed by Jessica L. Winter with Rosen Bien Galvin & Grunfeld LLP in San Francisco, instead argued for a two-step process designed to get individual prison officials to "take responsibility." It argues the problem was not mistakes but intentional efforts to mislead the plaintiffs and the court.

"Each time defendants present data to the court, the attorney responsible for the filing or submission and the official with personal knowledge of how the data was prepared must take responsibility for the representations," the brief argued. "Only with these safeguards in place can the knowing misrepresentations that led to and were revealed by the Golding Report and associated evidentiary hearing be avoided in the future."