The Abridged version:
- Kimberly Mueller, longtime federal judge in Sacramento and a former City Council member, is retiring, leaving a lingering mental health case to others to oversee.
- Efforts to fix California’s prison mental health system will conservatively take another five to seven years and cost taxpayers a quarter-billion dollars.
- At stake is the well-being of about 35,000 state prisoners with serious mental illness, including those housed in state facilities in Folsom, Stockton and Vacaville.
Court efforts to fix California’s broken, deadly prison mental health system have been dragging on for more than 30 years in a class-action lawsuit running so long that it will soon be overseen by a third generation of Sacramento-based judges.
Now the latest bid to fix the problem will conservatively take another five to seven years and cost taxpayers a quarter-billion dollars, according to court documents.
Senior U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller seized control from state officials and installed her own overseer whose timeline to fix the problems begins Nov. 1. Colette Peters now has all the powers – and responsibilities – once held by California’s corrections secretary when it comes to running the prison mental health system, including the ability to hire, fire, promote and discipline state employees.
It is one of the last major decisions by Mueller. She is leaving Sacramento and retiring at the end of 2025. Next year, she will become a law professor and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School. Mueller, a former member of the Sacramento City Council, has been a federal magistrate judge since 2003 and district judge since 2010.
At stake in the mental health case is the well-being of about 35,000 prisoners with serious mental illness, more than a third of the roughly 90,000 people in California prisons. Among the most severely affected are prisoners housed at the California State Prison, Sacramento, commonly known as New Folsom; California Health Care Facility in Stockton and the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Mueller, who declined an interview request, has been intensively involved in the case and notably frustrated by its progress ever since she took it over from Judge Lawrence Karlton, who died in 2015.
Now Mueller will leave behind a receiver who can negotiate with labor unions, acquire or dispose of state-owned property, and do virtually anything else she thinks is necessary to finally resolve a 35-year-old lawsuit that found prisoner mental health care so bad as to be unconstitutional.
Peters was director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons until she was dismissed on the first day of President Donald Trump’s administration in January. She is bringing two of her top federal deputies along to help run the state’s system.
She was appointed after a four-month trial run during which she developed an action plan that Peters projects will take years to correct long-festering problems. That includes bringing “culture change” to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, where she found low morale among mental health workers in part because of chronic understaffing and in part because they often fear the very prisoners they are supposed to be helping.
No other cajoling or court actions short of federal control have worked to bring adequate mental health care, Mueller decided.
Mueller’s previous actions culminated in her holding top state officials in contempt last year for understaffing and ordering fines that now exceed $114 million. State officials said they were unable to recruit enough staff because of a nationwide shortage of mental health workers, including a roughly 40% shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists in California.
In April 2023, Mueller also began assessing $1,000-a-day fines for the state’s failure to implement court-ordered suicide prevention measures, yet a court expert’s report in September found the state still is not in compliance. The prisons’ 2023 suicide rate was higher than when the class-action lawsuit was filed in 1995. The 2024 rate was the highest on record.
“The work is unfinished, the progress too slow and no end in sight if the current framework remains in place,” Mueller wrote in appointing Peters. “Despite the court’s issuance of over 250 orders in thirty years, this case remains rife with conflict and delay.”
State officials under Gov. Gavin Newsom “have resisted much of the way,” Mueller said, filing 18 unsuccessful appeals in just the last eight years and leading to what she termed a “vicious adversarial cycle” that she hopes can be broken by her appointing a receiver.
Attorneys for the state argued that Mueller lacked the legal grounds to appoint a receiver, though they did not appeal her decision. Mueller’s order included incentives for the state’s acquiescence, including a hold on the contempt fines and no new contempt proceedings while the receiver does her work.
“This is a time for fresh eyes and fresh ideas,” the state’s attorneys said in generally supporting Peters’ reform plan over the court’s continued use of a special master with fewer powers.
Fixing the systemic problems “will go faster with the cooperation of everyone working together towards that goal. We’re very hopeful that that’s going to happen,” said Michael Bien, an attorney representing prisoners in the lawsuit. “I’m still concerned that there are people in the state, they still want to fight the case rather than solve the problem.”
In a statement, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said, “Wellbeing of all incarcerated people and employees is a top priority of the Department. We are proud of the significant improvements in the mental health care of the incarcerated population and we are committed to working with the court-appointed receiver.”
Peters said fixing the mental health system won’t come cheaply, nor quickly. Five to seven years is “very optimistic” and depends in large part on the state’s “willingness to turn toward constructive, forward-looking implementation and away from litigation,” she said in her reform plan.
She expects to spend about $9 million annually on her core staff of 10 plus another eight full- and part-time experts, plus an additional nearly $7 million on resources teams and consultants to help fix the problems she sees within the current system.
The lion’s share will be more than $25 million a year to make permanent bonuses of up to $20,000 to hire and retain mental health workers like psychologists and psychiatric social workers. That drives her total expected annual spending to more than $41 million or nearly $290 million over seven years.
Don Thompson is a Roseville-based freelance journalist.