COURANT- Jail guards lie all the time and UConn is notoriously brainless.
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: COURANT- Jail guards lie all the time and UConn is
notoriously brainless.
Date: Mar 14, 2011 6:54 AM
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-prison-mental-health-0306-20110305,0,698900.story
But who believes a prisoner
about all the abuses that
go on in jail?
The guards deliberately provoke
fights so they can call a code
and of them get 72 hours of
overtime.
I seen it a million times.
Remember, I am your friendly
neighborhood "dangerously intelligent
Unabomber chemist."
I know what goes on in the prisons.
Full blown psychosis - raging,
fist swinging, talking-to-oneself
ANGRILY (when they think no one is
watching) - on the part of the guards.
Oh, and the psych meds are handed
out to anyone who wants them. I
was told I could get exactly: "WHATEVER
[I] WANTED."
"JUST NAME IT."
They invite all the prisoners in
for a chat with the "psychiatrist" in
order to order whatever psych meds they
want... in order to sleep their sentences
away.
Most of them are on Seroquel.
A lot of them are in jail in the
first place because they "know what
psychiatrist to go to" to get
a Disability diagnosis of "depression."
You can get whatever brain or pain
candy you want on the street from
these same people, who sell the drugs
for pot- or booze- money.
That's a tough operation to break
up, ain't it?
You're pitting the world's first
class liars against all the second
and third class liars.
All on the incompetent Dot Guv's
dole and paid for with Chinese tolerance.
Waiting us out. Waiting for the country
to collapse. Waiting to scrape-up what's
left from the abandoned US bases and oil
fields.
They're smarter than us'n Ceptional
Mairkins.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
============================================
courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-prison-mental-
health-0306-20110305,0,698900.story
Courant.com
Critics Assail UConn's $98 Million Deal For Prisoner Mental Health
Services
Some Say Contract Should Be Bid, Services Could Be Better
By JOSH KOVNER, jko...@courant.com
The Hartford Courant
10:37 PM EDT, March 13, 2011
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HARTFORD — The UConn Health Center for the last 13 years has provided
mental-health and medical services to the state prison system under a
no-bid agreement with no expiration date — a deal that is now drawing
increasing criticism in the face of the state's projected $3.7 billion
deficit.
The program's cost for this fiscal year will be $98.6 million, up from
$92.9 million last year. The health-center division that performs the
services, Correctional Managed Health Care, has 807 full- and part-
time employees.
The price tag and insular, non-competitive nature of the program have
some lawmakers and human-service advocates suggesting that it should
be put out to bid or at least opened up to competitive negotiations
with other quasi-public or private providers.
The health center's precarious financial position is also playing into
the discussion. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's budget chief acknowledged that
if UConn were to lose the arrangement with the Department of
Correction, the state would have to increase its subsidies to the
center in other areas.
The problem, say legislators and human-service advocates, is this: The
UConn Health Center may be doing a good job at an acceptable price in
a difficult prison environment, as correction officials maintain, but
that proposition can never be proven without subjecting the
arrangement to competition.
"For nearly $100 million, taxpayers should know what the gold standard
is for mental-health services in our prisons,'' said Vivien Blackford,
a former state human-rights commission member who sits on a newly
formed sentencing review board.
The arrangement exists in a murky area of state procurement law. Bids
are required under most circumstances when a state agency goes
shopping for a private vendor. But in this case, the health center and
the Department of Correction are both entities of the government, one
providing services to another. They call their arrangement a
"memorandum of agreement,'' rather than a contract.
"This has been in place since '97 – there's no transparency, there's
no bid,'' said Republican state Sen. Rob Kane of Watertown, ranking
member of the legislature's appropriations committee. "Is it plausible
to have a private, for-profit, provider perform these services?"
A newly proposed bill would wipe out any remaining exceptions to state
laws that already ban no-bid contracts in most cases, though it wasn't
immediately clear if the UConn-correction department arrangement would
be affected.
Correction department spokesman Brian Garnett said he'll let the
legislature decide the fate of the arrangement.
He said the agreement "has been updated over the years, most recently
last fall, with a major re-write currently underway. … It details
required mental health services and requires a comprehensive
performance audit of the healthcare program at each facility every six
months to evaluate compliance.''
UConn Health Center officials referred questions about the program to
the correction department.
The health center quietly entered the prison health care business in
the late 1990s.
A program overview from 2005 says that a 12-bed inpatient unit for
inmates opened at UConn's John Dempsey Hospital in 1995. Two years
later, the report says, "the UConn Health Center assumed all health-
service provision from the Department of Correction in November
1997.''
There are roughly 17,900 inmates in state prisons and 4,700 inmates in
community-based programs. About 18 percent of the inmate population
has mental illness.
Finding acceptable alternatives to the UConn deal may be difficult.
Private providers of prison health care have had their share of
problems across the country.
"We've got lobbyists [for some of the private providers] marching
around the Capitol; some of whom want to introduce themselves to me,''
said Ben Barnes, budget chief for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
"Their interest is understandable,'' said Barnes. "This is a lucrative
piece of business that private providers very much want. Any change
would have to be done gradually, with great caution.''
And then there's the health center's financial problems.
"They're in horrible financial shape. We already heavily subsidize
them. It's money one way or the other,'' said Barnes.
There's also a larger problem that goes beyond the health center and
the correction department. Advocates for people with disabilities and
civil-rights lawyers say there are too many people in Connecticut's
prisons who are there because they are mentally ill, not because they
are dangerous, violent criminals.
Michael Lawlor, Malloy's chief of criminal justice planning and
policy, said that too often defendants with mental problems who can't
make bail end up at Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, the
treatment center of the prison system.
The Garner inmates range from convicted murderers who are profoundly
mentally ill to low-risk inmates with much milder conditions.
A veteran state corrections officer who works at Garner said officers
widely believe that the more functional inmates "manipulate the
system'' by faking symptoms or "hurting themselves" to get to Garner,
or to stay there.
"Some inmates are really sick,'' the officer said, "but Garner has
become a recreation center.''
The Garner facility, said Lawlor, "has created a 'build it and they
will come' situation. Garner is a modern mental hospital inside a
modern prison, and it's extraordinarily expensive. So here's the
dilemma: keep on stacking resources and expanding mental health
services in prison, where the state gets no reimbursement from
Medicaid, or develop other options in the community.''
Inside prison walls, inmates have a constitutional right to medical
and mental-health care, but the federal government does not reimburse
the states for those costs.
Barnes said he's not aware of any concerns with the health center's
performance in the prisons, and, as a result, tinkering with UConn's
agreement with the correction department "will not be a priority of
this budget cycle.''
But advocates say there are problems with the quality of medical and
mental-health care.
David McGuire, a lawyer with the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union,
said complaints from inmates about treatment delays and the quality of
care are increasing.
"Seventy-five percent of the letters we receive from inmates concern
inadequate health care,'' McGuire said.
Nancy Alisberg, a lawyer with the state Office of Protection and
Advocacy for Persons With Disabilities, also reported an uptick in
complaints. She said her office has increased its monitoring of mental-
health and medical care in prisons.
The protection and advocacy office and the American Civil Liberties
Union sued the correction department in 2003 over substandard handling
of mentally ill prisoners at the maximum security Northern
Correctional Institution in Somers. The two sides reached a settlement
in 2004 that, among some other reforms, increased access to the
treatment programs at Garner for some mentally ill inmates who had
been segregated at Northern. But the settlement expired in 2007.
James McGaughey, the executive director of the protection and advocacy
office, said he feels the UConn-correction department agreement "is
problematic,'' but that providing mental-health and medical services
at a consistently high quality in a prison environment is extremely
difficult under any circumstance.
He recalled a visit to Garner: An inmate in his 20s stood in the front
of his cell and screamed non-stop for the duration of McGaughey's time
there. He viewed a counseling session in which the counselor sat in
the middle of a semi-circle of inmates who were seated in individual
cages. The cages are used so correction officers don't have to be in
the room during the sessions.
"Not your typical therapy group,'' McGaughey said.
UConn officials have said in public testimony that they are trying to
control costs. They acknowledge in reports that overtime and the
timely filling of vacancies in nursing services and other professional
ranks have been an issue.
Dr. Robert Trestman, the correctional health care program's director,
told the appropriations committee in testimony in December that the
number of inmates behind bars has declined in the last three years,
but the percentage of those prisoners with mental illness has
increased.
KMDickson