Below is the testimony of Corey Weinstein, MD, presented at the California State Legislature's hearing on women in prison, October 10, 2000:
Corey Weinstein, M.D.
San Francisco, CA 94114
Major Changes Required for CDoC Medical Services
During my 30 years of medical practice in California I have visited hundreds of prisoners in 13 of our State’s 33 prisons and reviewed thousands of prison medical charts. Since the tragic and unnecessary death in 1992 of a prisoner, Diana Cortes Reyes, I have conducted regular visits to the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla. During the recent class action legal challenge on behalf of women prisoners, Shumate v. Wilson, I served as medical consultant to the plaintiffs legal team doing monthly interviews at CCWF, one site visit to California Institution for Women and reviewed every medical record of the named plaintiffs and important cases.
My experience has made me well aware of the difficulties that prisoners in California continue to have in accessing adequate medical and psychiatric care. The California Department of Corrections has been resistant to any change whether mandated from without by the Courts or attempted from within through the dramatic expansion of CDoC medical executive and modernization of administration. Neither money, nor law nor reorganization has been able to effect the changes necessary to establish baseline adequate care in our prisons. The result is suffering and needless death and disability for the prisoners, and demoralization and patient blaming by the staff.
I want to emphasize that merely tinkering with the present disaster whether by Court order, internal rearrangement or quiet backroom deals between well meaning attorneys, CDoC leadership and the Federal Court is not enough. A major restructuring is required. The present medical leadership of CDoC has been compromised in many ways and cannot earn back the trust of the prisoners or the community. For example, how can the Department retain those responsible for the failure to develop a plan of quality assurance for the BCL Lab that falsified thousands of test results, and then for four years failed to review one single prisoner’s file until the SF Chronicle reported on the scandal. In any other industry those responsible would have been fired. There are even serious allegations from ten whistleblowers that the CDoC central office arranged for their staff to tamper with medical records to fake compliance with the Settlement Agreement in the Shumate case.
As a Correctional Officer described to me during a visit to CCWF, within the CDoC the staff do not trust or communicate well with each other. Medical, custody and administration are at each other’s throats all the time. It is a dysfunctional workforce that often degenerates into the culture of alliances and enemies. The staff who want to deliver good care are frequently labeled and harassed as “inmate lovers.” Many prison employees agree on only one thing -as the guard’s union trumpets so often- that the main enemies are the prisoners and their families, visitors and supporters (and some members of this esteemed panel).
.............more
http://www.prisons.org/Legislative.htm Just a sample. More info at the main website.
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