SACRAMENTO, Calif. California would build two prison hospitals under a proposed settlement to a long-running dispute between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration and the federal courts over inmate medical care.
The settlement, an outline of which was given Thursday to The Associated Press, would mark the first step toward ending a legal drama that appeared headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The agreement would call for a sharply scaled-down and far less expensive plan to improve prison medical care than the one previously presented by J. Clark Kelso, a court-appointed receiver who oversees prison medical care.
Kelso and California Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said their plan includes building two prison hospitals to house 3,400 inmates, at a cost of $1.9 billion.
Kelso's original plan called for building seven medical centers to house 10,000 inmates, with construction costs of about $6 billion.
The settlement they outlined to the AP was a concession to fiscal reality as California faces a $24.3 billion budget deficit. Both said final details would be worked out in the next few days, and the settlement still needs approval from the federal courts and state lawmakers.
"We're in a financial crisis," Kelso said. "We've been able to figure out how to spend a lot less money than we'd been talking about last year."
Under the proposed settlement, the state would end its lawsuit attempting to terminate the receivership, while Kelso would halt his effort to hold Schwarzenegger in contempt of court for failing to turn over construction money.
The Schwarzenegger administration and the court-appointed receiver had been working more or less cooperatively to resolve the legal dispute over inmate medical care until California's budget crisis worsened.
Attorney General Jerry Brown, siding with the administration, had said Kelso was unaccountable and wasting taxpayer money. The state contended the receiver did not have the right to reach into the state treasury for prison-construction money and planned to wage its fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
The receiver's original proposal also called for indoor basketball and handball courts, electronic bingo boards, and stress-reduction, music-therapy and yoga rooms amenities that exposed the plan to ridicule.
Kelso said Thursday that the state's declining financial condition was one of the factors forcing his office and the state to work together and resolve the legal dispute quickly.
A federal judge in San Francisco seized control of prison medical care and created the receivership in 2005.
The court determined that the level of care was so poor that negligence or malfeasance accounted for the death, on average, of one inmate a week. A second judge, in Sacramento, found that mental health treatment is so poor it often leads to inmate suicides.
Under the latest plan, two new medical facilities would be built at existing prisons, one in Northern California and one in Southern California.
The proposal by Cate and Kelso calls for converting at least one underused juvenile prison into a medical center housing physically or mentally ill inmates who require lower levels of care. Other sick or mentally ill inmates would be concentrated in prisons near urban areas where they could more easily get care from outside specialists.
Upgrading existing prisons to house those inmates will cost an additional $1.3 billion.
The two new medical centers would be paid for with bonds issued in a way that does not directly require legislators' approval.
The proposal anticipates a reduction in the prison population as thousands of inmates are freed before completing their full sentences. A special panel of federal judges has tentatively decided that prisons are too crowded to provide proper inmate care and could order inmate releases as a remedy. Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger has proposed releasing lower-level offenders to save money.
State Assemblyman Jim Nielson, a Yuba City Republican who previously chaired the state parole board, called the proposed settlement a "very positive" step toward California retaking control of its prison system.
Other Democratic and Republican lawmakers familiar with the prison litigation reacted cautiously to the announcement.
"Two billion is definitely an improvement over $6 billion, but the devil is in the details. We've been told they're close to an agreement before, and it's evaporated," said state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco.