US judge names recipient to take over California prisons' mental health program

US judge names recipient to take over California prisons' mental health program

A judge has initiated a federal court takeover of California's mental health system by naming the former head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a recipient, giving her four months to come up with a plan to adequately care for tens of thousands of prisoners with serious mental illnesses.

Senior U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller issued her order on March 19, identifying Colette Peters as the nominated recipient. Peters, who was Oregon's first female corrections director and was known as a reformer, ran the scandal-plagued federal prison for 30 months until President Donald Trump took office in January. During her term, she closed a women's prison in Dublin, east of Oakland, that had become known as a "rape club."

Michael Bien, who represents prisoners with mental illness in the long-running prison lawsuit, said Peters was a good choice. Bien said Peters' time in Oregon and Washington, D.C., showed that she "kind of buys into the fact that there are things we can do better in the American system."

“We have raised strong objections to a lot of things that happened under her tenure in the BOP, but I think this is a different job and she is capable of doing it,” said Bien, whose firm also represents women housed at the federal women’s prison.

California corrections officials called Peters “highly qualified” in a statement, while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not immediately comment. Müller gave the parties until March 28 to show why Peters should not be appointed.

Peters is not speaking to the media at this time, Bien said. The judge said Peters is entitled to $400,000 a year, to be paid for the four-month period.

About 34,000 people in California have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, representing more than a third of California's prison population, facing harm because of the state's noncompliance, Mueller said.

Appointing a receiver is a rare step when federal judges feel they have exhausted other options. A receiver took control of Alabama's correctional system in 1976 and was otherwise used to govern prisons and jails only about a dozen times, mostly to address poor conditions caused by overcrowding. Attorneys representing inmates in Arizona have asked a judge to take over prison health care there.

Mueller's appointment of a receiver comes nearly 20 years after another federal judge seized control of California's prison-medical system and installed a receiver, currently J. Clark Kelso, with broad powers to rent, fire and spend the state's money.

In August, California officials initially said the recipient was Kelso and said federal oversight had "successfully transformed health care in California." But Kelso withdrew from consideration in September, as did two subsequent candidates. Kelso said he couldn't act "zealously and with fidelity as a receiver" in either case.

Both cases have run so long that they are now overseen by a second generation of judges. The original federal judges forced California to significantly reduce prison procedures to improve medical and mental health care for incarcerated people more than a decade ago in a lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

State officials in court filings defended their improvements over the decades. Prisoners' lawyers countered that treatment remains poor, as evidenced in part by the system's record-high suicide rate, which has exceeded 31 suicides per 100,000 prisoners, nearly double the rate in federal prisons.

“More than a quarter of the 30 class members who died by suicide in 2023 received inadequate care due to undertofing,” the prisoners’ attorneys wrote in January, citing the prison system’s own analysis. One prisoner was denied mental health appointments for seven months “before hanging himself with a bed sheet.”

They argued that the November passage of a ballot measure that increases criminal penalties for some drug and theft crimes is likely to increase the prison population and worsen staffing shortages.

California officials argued in January that Mueller was not legally justified in naming a receiver because "progress has been slow at times but has not stalled."

Mueller has acknowledged that she had no choice but to appoint an outside professional to oversee the prisons' mental health program, given officials' intransigence even after she sued top officials for court charges and over $110 million charges in June. These extreme actions, she said, only triggered more delays.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on March 19 upheld Mueller's contempt, but said she had not adequately justified the calculation of the fines by doubling the state's monthly salary savings from understaffed prisons. It upheld the fines to the extent they reflected the state's actual salary savings, but sent the case back to Mueller to justify a higher penalty.

Mueller was set to initiate another civil contempt proceeding against state officials for failing to meet two other court requirements: adequately improving the prison system's psychiatric inpatient program and improving suicide prevention measures. These could bring additional fines exceeding tens of millions of dollars.

But she said her initial disdain did not have the intended effect of convincing compliance. Back in July, Mueller wrote that additional contempt decisions would also likely be ineffective as state officials continued to appeal and seek delays, leading to "more endless litigation, litigation, litigation."

She went on to mention her recent order naming a recipient in a temporary order: "There is one step that the court must avoid. At this time," Mueller wrote:

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing “988” or texting “.

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