Since 2006, the federal courts have had a formal oversight role with California’s prison health care system – a result of a long history of poor care provided to inmates. A new scandal makes it seem highly unlikely that the state will regain full control of its prisons any time soon.

Sacramento-based U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller – who is the present overseer of the system – has ordered an independent investigation into allegations that the state systematically lied about the care being provided to the 30,000-plus inmates with significant mental health issues.

The allegations were detailed in a 161-page report by Dr. Michael Golding, chief psychiatrist for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. While officials claim that mental health treatment in state prisons is much better than it used to be, Golding wrote in a 161-page whistle-blower report that fewer than half of inmates were seen within the strict time limits set after past lawsuits, and that some inmates didn’t receive treatment for months.

Golding wrote that one female inmate who wasn’t provided needed medication yanked out one of her eyeballs and then ate it.

State denies lying about mental health treatments

The state has vigorously challenged Golding’s claims since he leaked his report in October. In court filings, lawyers for the state say he often jumped to conclusions based on vague evidence. “Dr. Golding’s implication that patients languish for many months without a psychiatric contact is inaccurate,” said one document.

State lawyers also strongly opposed Mueller’s decision to name former U.S. Attorney Charles Stevens to investigate the allegations, saying it overstepped her authority and that existing prison monitors could handle a probe. They also blasted the judge’s requirement that the state pay for the investigation.

But Mueller said in appointing Stevens, she was fulfilling her responsibility in her oversight role. “The court has not merely the authority, but also the duty, to protect the integrity of the judicial process,” Mueller wrote.

She also ordered prison officials not to retaliate against Golding and other prison staffers who helped him gather information for his report.

Mueller directed Stevens to report back to her by mid-April on his findings. While a U.S. attorney in the Clinton administration, Mueller won a reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor for his role in convicting the Unabomber, Theodore John Kaczynski, and in several political corruption cases.

This isn’t the first time that the Brown administration has accused Mueller of going beyond what is allowed in her prison oversight role. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in November rejected the state’s argument that she didn’t have the authority to fine the state $1,000 a day if mentally ill inmates didn’t get timely treatment.

Mueller may hold off imposing such fines until Stevens delivers his report on the new allegations.

Three prison psychiatrists have alleged wrongdoing

Two other Corrections Department psychiatrists have made allegations about poor mental health care that were similar to Golding’s, according to a Sacramento Bee report last month. Dr. Melanie Gonzalez still works for the department and also received a protection order on her behalf from Mueller. Dr. Karuna Anand says she was fired by the agency last year after complaining about how bad conditions were at the state prison in Stockton. She is pursuing a civil lawsuit against the state.

The federal oversight of state prisons was ordered in 2006 by U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson. The ruling resulted from a class-action lawsuit filed in 2001 against the state over health care in California prisons.

And as for retirement benefits, increase those by 79 percent total, or 53 percent per individual employee.

These are figures for the California Department of Technology, which again finds itself the butt of a fault-finding audit.

The report is one big bad report card. It notes that 73 of 77 state departments have not met standard safeguards for their information, for which the department is supposed to be the guardian.

Prone to Hackers

The newly discovered trouble involves the security of state-held information, including the news that the state’s data centers are subject to thousands of hacker attempts every month.

“The California Department of Technology does not provide adequate oversight or guidance to state entities under the direct authority of the governor (reporting entities) for which it has purview,” the audit finds.

Auditors were so troubled by lapses in information security at the state’s Department of Corrections that they issued a separate memo to that agency outlining the problems — the details of which were “too sensitive to release publicly.”

State agencies possess reams of information, from the bank account numbers on income tax forms to the birth dates of victims of crime and the Social Security numbers of people applying for food stamps.

The Department of Motor Vehicles alone holds more than 27 million records.

There are committees (“the Select Committee on Cybersecurity” in the statehouse) and task forces (the “California Cybersecurity Task Force”) in place to help protect data and info from intruders. But it’s the tech department that has responsibility for ensuring departments’ info is secured. To do so, it requires three annual reports. Last year it even offered a one-day seminar to teach info management people what’s up with data safeguarding.

Who’s at Fault?

In one regard, it’s not all on the department; the report found that 90 percent of select departments queried said that they had met the mandates for security when they really hadn’t.

Still, when four in 10 departments reported they had not achieved full compliance, “we expected that the technology department would have followed up. … However, when we reviewed the 2014 correspondence between the technology department and a selection of eight noncompliant reporting entities, we found that the technology department did not conduct any follow‑up.”

In addition, there are no policies on how to enforce the security requirements.

One more interesting element of the audit: Twenty agencies declined to be monitored or assessed and were therefore not measured for cybersecurity compliance. Among them were the Office of the Inspector General, California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery and the Public Employees’ Retirement System.

The auditing team recommends that state lawmakers require the tech department to do an independent, comprehensive security assessment of each reporting entity at least every other year.

Auditors also ask legislators to allow the department to ask for money upon any finding of security flaws. The technology department should follow up on any troubled agency and how that agency intends to make its information more secure, the report says.

Then a final scold from the auditors: “As a result of the outstanding weaknesses in reporting entities’ information system controls and the technology department’s failure to provide effective oversight and assist noncompliant entities in meeting the security standards, we determined that some of the state’s information, and its critical information systems, are potentially vulnerable and continue to pose an area of significant risk to the state.”

The Department of Technology didn’t answer questions, but gave the Associated Press a written statement, saying that it is committed to improving oversight and to “improving the state’s overall information security posture.”

A Continuing Pattern

The report is the second in the last six months to beat down the department. The last one upbraided tech department officials for wasting tens of millions of dollars due to computer troubles and aborted projects that cost taxpayers up to $1 billion.

Some lawmakers are trying to throw more money at the agency.

One measure would allow the technology department to size up contractors with an evaluation scorecard that would cost  $350,000.

“There is no guarantee that they will implement the evaluation system in a long term capacity,” Assemblywoman Autumn Burke, D-Los Angeles, told a Senate committee earlier this month. “In fact, a simple change of leadership with CalTech could put the evaluation system in jeopardy.”

Also noted in the conversation was something as scary as a data breach: “Currently the state has 44 IT projects under development that are reported to cost more than $4 billion,” Burke told her colleagues.

By Joseph Perkins

California faces a Friday deadline to schedule the early release of hundreds, if not thousands, of state prison inmates. The deadline was imposed two weeks ago by a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined that the Golden State has made insufficient progress in reducing the nation’s worst prison overcrowding.

In May last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Circuit’s 2009 court order that California reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity, a level above which, the High Court agreed, constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”

California made initial progress toward meeting the lower court’s June 2013 deadline, with the state inmate population shrinking by 4,000 a month as of last October, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of state prison population reports.

However, monthly declines have since slowed to fewer than 1,000 a month as most low-level offenders — convicts sentenced for non-violent, non-sexual and “non-serious” crimes — have been turned out of state prisons.

That makes it difficult for California to identify a substantial number of inmates remaining in the state prison system who, as the Ninth Circuit panel put it two Fridays ago, are “unlikely to reoffend or who might otherwise be candidates for early release.”

That’s why state officials informed the lower court that California intends to petition for a higher ceiling on the state prison population of 145 percent of capacity, rather than 137.5 percent.

But even if the court approved the higher capacity — a doubtful proposition — it is unlikely California would even reach that more lenient target. That’s because the state is in the process of ending the practice, initiated in 2006 by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, of housing inmates in out-of-state private prisons to ease in-state overcrowding.

The Department of Corrections reports that there currently are some 9,300 California convicts serving their time in such states as Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi.

The state plans to bring all of them back to California by 2016, beginning with 2,000 inmates housed in an Oklahoma correctional facility that will be returned to this state’s overcrowded prison system by the end of 2013.

It remains to be see if California reconsiders its plan to end its contracts with out-of-state prisons in the wake of the deadline challenge it faces this Friday, and the considerably more daunting deadline that awaits a mere ten months from now, when the state’s prison population must be no more than 137.5 percent of capacity.

The nation’s worst prison overcrowding would not be so bad had the Democrat-controlled state government not bowed to pressure from the politically influential California Correctional Peace Officers Association (which represents prison guards employed at the 33 state prisons) to shutter California’s private prisons.

Indeed, over the past decade, the state government has cancelled contracts with Corrections Corporation of America, Cornell Corrections and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), resulting in the closure of seven private correctional facilities here in California.

Those private prisons would be most useful in helping the state to comply with the federal court order under the state’s prison system is currently operating.