A while ago, I suggested that that the State of California seems to want prisoners to die. Maybe I was too harsh; maybe the State of California, as a governing entity, is just so cripplingly stupid that it can’t help but kill off prisoners, like Lenny with his little bunny rabbits.
Last time round it was people with susceptible to Valley Fever
who were going to die of second-hand stupid. Somehow, Jerry Brown’s journey toward octogenarianism led him (either by way of the Age of Aquarius, or a likely unpleasant meeting with his own Attorney General) to relent and belatedly decide that letting people die of airborne diseases was, well, a bad idea.
The legislature is still beavering away with Important Things, though, and prisoners are still dying for terrible reasons – reasons like the mental health problems that got them in prison in the first place, and the gross ineptitude of the prison system.
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton said that California officials “divorced themselves from reality” when they recently claimed mental health care is “up to par” in state prisons. Why? Well, in part because Desmond Watkins, 36, drank himself to death in Salinas Valley prison.
Not that he was an alcoholic, mind you. Mr. Watkins had psychogenic polydipsia, a serious psychiatric condition that causes unquenchable thirst. Mr. Watkins was sent to a mental health prison hospital to get treatment for the disease that caused his terrible, potentially fatal thirst. The people who run the state mental hospital where he was sent locked him in a cell … with unlimited running water. He’s dead because they’re stupid; Mr. Watkins died of second-hand stupid.
Prison is a terrible and stupid place; you don’t belong there. As a fellow inmate of Mr. Watkins’ scrawled on his wall before he killed himself, “I came here slightly depressed. Now I am severely depressed. This place is hopeless.”
Don’t give up hope – hire someone who cares. If you need protection from the idiocracy, give me a call.