Posted on 11/27/2005 8:34:51 AM PST by SmithL
FOR A GRIM GLIMPSE of the future of California's correctional system, you need go no further than the California Medical Facility, a few blocks off Interstate 80 in Vacaville.
That's what we did a few weeks ago when we visited the prison, the only one in California dedicated to providing medical care to inmates.
What we saw pointed to the outcome of a "get tough on crime" policy that began decades ago, and has resulted in the continuing incarceration of thousands of ailing and aging inmates, most of whom present little or no threat to public safety.
In mid-September, the Vacaville facility opened the first licensed elderly care unit in a California prison. It offers an even higher level of care than a regular nursing home to inmates who can no longer care for themselves. It is home to 17 inmates ranging in age from 43 to 82. Half suffer from dementia. Some are paralyzed from strokes. Name a common debilitating disease -- from insulin-dependent diabetes to Parkinson's disease -- and you're likely to find it there.
On the day we visited, three inmates lay on beds in the "day room" of the elderly care unit. They seemed barely conscious. Sixty-one-year-old Richard Carreiro was the only one who seemed aware of his surroundings, as he sat in a wheelchair watching a rerun of the television show "Cops." He has been battling drug problems since he was 12, and has been in and out of jail almost as long. Rather than being incarcerated, he says he should be getting drug treatment. But the last time he was in a prison drug-treatment program was in the 1960s.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
poor little old murderers, thugs, and thieves. Those juries and judges didn't really mean to keep you incarcerated if you got sick. That's no fair
We need to keep criminals behind bars, even better would be to put them in tent cities with no color cable TV.
They present little to no threat to public safety, precisely because they are put away for life!
tent cities in Death Valley. thats whats needed.
The ironical thang to these writers is that these inmates don't want to leave at this point.
That's good news. When I reach the age when I will need nursing care, I will visit California and commit a serious crime.
cry me a liberal river
The idea of killing the old and infirm could be the assisted suicide policy of Oregon. Think of it, would the powers behind articles like this support euthanizing these inmates when it got to be too expensive to house them with geriatric care?
I could care less about their suffering, and in the mood I'm in after reading this drivel the criminals should thank God I'm not in charge of their care.
Maybe my dad can rob a bank and live the good life.
We need to do that here in Texas for sure. Lots of room out in West Texas....
um.....sarcasm?
Let me know and I'll drive the getaway car real slow for us. Heck, free medical, free dental, free room and board, free arts and crafts, free continuing education, free legal, all the books I can read, and free HBO!
And all the sex your cellmate wants.
---The state should also consider granting "compassionate release" to feeble or dying inmates who have already served the fixed portions of their sentence, and are eligible for parole. Continuing to incarcerate them, even in model programs like those at Vacaville, amounts to unnecessarily cruel punishment and disregards the spiraling costs being inflicted on California taxpayers. ---
Where else would they go? Are we going to put them up in condos down by the local county hospital? Or do we just let them out on the streets of San Francisco? Brainless liberal do-goodism at it's finest.
Granted not all who are aging and sick and dying would have received the death penalty but a fair number who would have are now costing us $$$ as they lay dying
This is what happens when you don't execute criminals. Life without parole means life, and sometimes it's a long one.
Wonder where the feeble and the dying will receive their medical care following compassionate release, so that California taxpayers are spared those spiraling costs?
This writer doesn't seem to want to take his article pass the walls of the correctional system.
The unexamined assumption is that if these people were "freed" from prison they would not be a burden on the public. Clearly, they'd just be moved from the prison wing of the hospital to the "charity" wing.
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