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The Academy of Architecture for Justice (AAJ) promotes and fosters the exchange of information and knowledge between members, professional organizations, and the public for high-quality planning, design, and delivery of justice architecture.

L.A. Times: "Admissions halted at problem-plagued Stockton prison"

  • 1.  L.A. Times: "Admissions halted at problem-plagued Stockton prison"

    Posted 02-05-2014 06:39 PM
    Greetings all,

    The "California Health Facility" prison hospital was the topic of a recent AAJ Northern California session. The project was intended to relieve unconstitutional levels of medical case in California's other prisons by providing centralize high-quality care for the sickest California prisoners (although medical clinic projects have been done at other prisons as well.)

    The following LA Times story gives me pause in considering the outcomes to date, and I thought the rest of you would want to know about this negative coverage. According to the article, the facility has not been fully staffed, meaning it is not providing as much care or relieving as much overcrowding as intended (or providing as many jobs as local residents were expecting, either). This might be a choice of site: Stockton is apparently not home to a large pool of qualified psychiatrists, nurses, or other health professionals, and building one large concentrated facility for healthcare may have been a poor choice in that regard. Also (and despite court orders) the client department does not appear prepared to use the facility to provide the intended level of care, as the story makes clear.

    Certainly the design and construction team met an incredibly aggressive schedule to put a massive project in place, but what did that gain the state (or anyone else) when they were unprepared to open it when the team finished it? Should they have built more small, distributed facilities instead? Should they have found more community-based settings to handle sick prisoners? Any other thoughts on the apparently insoluble crisis of California?

    http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ff-prison-stockton-20140205,0,5767187.story#ixzz2sTQI1ovB

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    Raphael Sperry AIA
    ADPSR
    San Francisco CA

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