Although some individuals who are incarcerated may be innocent, most are serving time for committing a crime, and many in society feel that law enforcement officials should lock them up and throw away the key. According to the law in California and other states, these inmates should receive quality medical care and treatment when they need it regardless of mistakes they have made in the past. Without the medical care they need, inmates may suffer from injuries and illnesses for years at a time, and family members on the outside must deal with the loss of someone they love.
After it was determined that inmates were dying on an average of one per week because of neglect and medical malpractice, federal courts required that the number of prisoners in state prisons be reduced by a certain percent. Recently, California Governor Jerry Brown released a plan to move close to 10,000 prisoners to private prisons or other incarceration facilities in order to meet these new requirements.
The judges who put the population cap in place did so as an attempt to fix conditions that are poor in many state prisons, and despite the Governor’s attempts to stay the order with several different courts, the Supreme Court of the United States denied his request in July of this year, forcing him to come up with a plan.
No matter what a person is in prison for, they may still have family members who grieve when they are hurting or ill. At times, prison is intended as a rehabilitation effort, and prisoners are often unable to be rehabilitated when the state does not provide them with adequate medical care.
Source: California Healthline, “Brown releases plan to move about 9,600 state prisoners,” August 28, 2013
