www.montereycountyweekly.com september 14-20, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 experienced at this jail,” he added, “is absolutely atrocious.” Stewart claimed he himself had been on the receiving end of such treatment—having been deprived of incontinence supplies and forced to dispose of soiled diapers in brown paper meal bags, for instance. “I am very concerned that more people like Mr. Hall might die.” More people would die. On May 22, six weeks after Hall’s death, deputies at Monterey County Jail responded to a 63-year-old male inmate who was found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead by paramedics soon after, according to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. Then two-and-a-half weeks later, on June 9, a 47-year-old male inmate was also found unresponsive in his cell, and transported to a hospital where he died. (The Sheriff’s Office has not publicly identified either of the men nor their causes of death.) Five people housed at the jail have died this year alone, according to attorneys representing the county jail’s inmates in a 2013 class-action lawsuit over inadequate health care at the facility. Twenty-six have died in the eight years since a 2015 settlement, the attorneys claim—noting that the jail’s annual death rate over that period is more than twice the national average for local jails, while its suicide rate is more than three times the average for California jails. Those deaths—plus other accounts of non-fatal illnesses and injuries—are even more alarming considering that the class-action settlement mandated that Monterey County Jail improve its health care conditions to avoid such outcomes. The agreement placed the onus squarely on the lawsuit’s defendants: the County of Monterey, the Sheriff’s Office (which manages the jail), and Wellpath—America’s largest prison health care contractor, which privately runs the jail’s medical, mental and dental health services. As part of legal efforts to prove that the defendants are in violation of the settlement, attorneys for the inmates won a court battle in August over the public release of more than 30 previously sealed reports from health care professionals tasked with regularly inspecting the jail to evaluate its compliance with the settlement agreement. These reports, filed by the neutral monitors, reveal an institution that has failed to consistently improve inmate conditions over the past eight years, and also bring unprecedented transparency to the jail’s operations and its treatment of the people housed there. (The Weekly—along with the First Amendment Coalition and the families of two people who died in the jail— joined the effort to unseal the monitor reports, filing as intervenors in the case. Additional monitors’ reports were obtained by the Weekly via a California Public Records Act request.) The documents reveal “the extent to which Wellpath and the County have utterly failed to meet their court-ordered obligations,” according to Van Swearingen, a partner at San Francisco-based law firm Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, which has represented the incarcerated people at the jail since the lawsuit was first filed in 2013. They also raise questions about the County’s relationship with Wellpath, which runs health care operations at roughly 500 jails, prisons and detention centers in 37 states across the country—including at more than half of California’s county jails. The company was formed through a 2018 merger between two prison health care contractors, Nashvillebased Correct Care Solutions and California Forensic Medical Group, which was founded by Monterey-based physician Taylor Fithian and had been contracted at Monterey County Jail since the mid-1980s. Wellpath has reportedly faced thousands of lawsuits in recent years related to its care of prisoners, resulting in legal orders such as a consent decree over its work at New Orleans’ city jail. That settlement mirrors many aspects of Wellpath’s issues in Monterey County: Physically and mentally ill patients were frequently deprived of proper care, resulting in injuries or deaths, while monitors tasked with overseeing the consent decree have subsequently found little improvement. Yet neither alleged malpractice nor the 2015 settlement—which has cost Monterey County taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees and compliance measures—discouraged the Board of Supervisors last year from renewing Wellpath’s contract at the jail through 2025, at a total cost of more than $44 million. While Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto says she is “laser-focused” on resolving the settlement and improving inmate conditions, it’s unclear whether things have gotten any better since she assumed her role last December. Though virtually all of the neutral-monitor reports detail the state of the facility under her predecessor, Steve Bernal, the five deaths under her watch this year have put the jail on track for its deadliest year since the settlement agreement was finalized, attorneys for the inmates claim. “This is an issue with jails in general up and down our entire state, not just Monterey,” Nieto says. She attributes the jail’s record to broader issues 2013 Monterey County Jail inmates bring a federal class-action lawsuit against the County of Monterey, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office and California Forensic Medical Group—the jail’s for-profit health care provider—over inadequate medical, mental and dental health care conditions that allegedly violate inmates’ constitutional rights. 2015 The parties reach a settlement in the class-action lawsuit, known as the “Hernandez settlement.” The agreement implements standards that must be met across the jail’s medical, mental and dental health care services, as well as disability services and inmate security, and calls for court-appointed neutral monitors to regularly inspect the facility to evaluate compliance. 2017 The court-appointed neutral monitors begin their regular site visits to Monterey County Jail. In his first audit in March 2017, the jail’s medical monitor, Dr. Bruce Barnett, finds the facility noncompliant in nine out of 13 quality indicator categories and designates an overall compliance score of 48.1 percent—well under the 80-percent mark generally accepted as compliant. 2018 California Forensic Medical Group—the prison health care provider founded in 1984 by Monterey-based physician Taylor Fithian—merges with Correct Care Solutions to form Wellpath. The deal creates the largest for-profit prison health care provider in the U.S., serving roughly 300,000 people in over 500 facilities. The company’s annual revenues are estimated at around $2 billion. 2020 A U.S. District Court judge overseeing the settlement orders Wellpath to develop “corrective action plans” to address areas in which the neutral monitors have found the jail to be “not in substantial compliance,” in response to the monitors’ reports identifying continued deficiencies in the jail’s medical, mental and dental health care services for inmates. Monterey County Jail litigation—a timeline of events. “I can’t begin to explain how appallingly I feel about the way the County treated my son.” Left: Eric Sand holds a picture of his son David, who died at Monterey County Jail in November 2022 at age 29. Sand had a documented history of schizophrenia that was overlooked by the jail’s health care staff, according to third-party monitors. Daniel Dreifuss An expansion project at Monterey County Jail was completed in 2022, raising the capacity from 825 to 1,401 inmates and alleviating problems with overcrowding. timeline continued next page
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