Imagine a society where convicts were sentenced to death by untreated renal failure or denial of chemotherapy. Modern Americans would surely consider such a place barbaric and cruel.
Yet in the 1990s and 2000s, California essentially meted out such punishments, knowingly shoveling unprecedented numbers of convicts into overcrowded, under-equipped prisons to serve long, hopeless sentences.
In 2006, "a preventable or possibly preventable death occurred" somewhere in California's prison system "once every five to six days," the U.S. Supreme Court observed in the 2011 case of Brown v. Plata. It's hard to find medical staff even for functional prisons; vacancies in the California system ranged from 20 percent for doctors to 44 percent for X-ray technicians.
[For more of this story, written by Sara Mayeux, go to http://www.newsweek.com/uncons...-overcrowding-315640]
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