Politics
Biden's prisons chief tapped to fix lagging mental health care in California lockups
SACRAMENTO — Following through on intentions broadcast a year ago, a federal judge is putting control of California’s troubled inmate mental health programs into the hands of an outsider: President Biden’s former chief of prisons.
With inmate suicide rates at an all-time high, U.S. District Senior Judge Kimberly Mueller said her aim is to force changes in California’s prison mental health system, which a federal judge in 1995 deemed to be so poor as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
To do that, Mueller is naming a federal “receiver-nominee” to develop an oversight plan for psychiatric services for California’s prison population. Three prior candidates, for varying reasons, passed up the job.
Mueller’s pick to tackle the prisoner mental health care system is Colette Peters, who stepped down as Federal Bureau of Prisons director the day Donald Trump returned to the White House. The choice was announced Tuesday during a closed-door meeting with lawyers for inmates and Gov. Gavin Newsom, and published Wednesday as an order. Participants in the case said Peters has accepted a four-month position.
In that time, Mueller proposes that Peters work with opposing sides to come up with a plan of attack. Her full appointment as receiver would hinge on that plan. Lawyers for the state and for inmates have 10 days to comment on the judge’s proffer.
Newsom’s office would not immediately comment on what it described as “pending litigation.” State lawyers Tuesday told Mueller that while Peters was an acceptable choice, they reserved the right to contest California’s loss of control over a critical and expensive component of its sprawling incarceration system, a hearing participant said.
In that vein, a state lawyer in December argued that the “weighty decision” for a court takeover requires evidentiary hearings. At the time, Supervising Deputy Atty. Gen. Damon McClain said the need for a receiver was negated by improving conditions — namely the hiring of more social workers, just one of the positions for which the prison system has chronic shortfalls.
The state’s rosy depiction of improvements drew a rebuke Wednesday as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Mueller’s July 2024 civil contempt findings against the state. The state argued it had “substantially complied” with orders to hire mental health staff “by taking all reasonable steps to comply.”
The appellate panel said that was untrue. It pointed to delays in responding to job applicants, and unaddressed grievances from staff frustrated with high workloads, lack of security protection, insufficient supplies and lousy workspaces “which often took the form of windowless converted cells in old and unheated prisons.”
The appellate opinion noted the state did not rebut this evidence or show why it could not address those problems.
Lawyers for inmates in the long-running class-action lawsuit described Mueller’s decision to name a receiver-nominee as a breakthrough. Plaintiff’s attorney Michael Bien said a receiver is empowered to make decisions that otherwise could be entangled in years of litigation. Dockets show lawyers for both sides have been wrangling for years over a policy to permit half of mental health staff to work remotely and deliver care by video and phone.
More than 34,000 inmates — more than a third of the California prison population — are considered to have some sort of serious mental disorder. According to court findings, not once in 35 years of litigation has California had enough mental health staff to provide an acceptable minimum level of care.
Court declarations cite a 2023 state analysis that found that of the 30 inmates who killed themselves in 2023, more than a fourth had received inadequate mental health care because of understaffing. One who hanged himself with a bedsheet had not had a mental health visit for more than seven months.
A special master appointed by the court to do fact-finding in the case said last year that a “bona fide mental health staffing emergency” persisted and in some prisons had gotten worse. The report concluded that only 38% of reviewed patients received adequate care.
The class-action lawsuit is named after a 1990 complaint filed by inmate Ralph Coleman, objecting to a lack of psychiatric services at Pelican Bay State Prison. It was expanded by prison rights attorneys to address what they allege are lapses in care that have resulted in inmate suicides, mentally ill prisoners being held naked in barren isolation cells and lengthy waiting lists for treatment.
In the course of the proceedings, prison rights attorneys have shown videotapes documenting the use of pepper spray, restraints, hoods and batons on mentally ill inmates in the throes of psychotic episodes.
Mueller, a former Sacramento City Council member who studied law at Stanford, was named to the Eastern District bench in 2010 by President Obama. She inherited the Coleman case from Judge Lawrence Karlton, who died in 2015 after retirement.
The Coleman case is one of two landmark class-action suits against California’s prison system that have been overseen by a three-judge panel that 10 years ago issued sweeping orders requiring California to reduce prison crowding.
The companion case found medical care in the prisons to be so poor as to cause preventable deaths, and resulted in appointment of its own federal receiver in 2006. Still present, that receiver has mandated increased funding for medical care and electronic health records, among other changes. Given the improvements, the court in 2015 began returning control of medical services to the state, one prison at a time. That process is nearly complete.
The Coleman case has so far failed to bring about similar improvements in inmate psychiatric care. As the prison population overall has decreased, the percentage of inmates in need of mental health services has risen.
Citing “ongoing constitutional violations,” Mueller in 2023 asked the U.S. attorney general to weigh in on California’s staffing for inmate mental health care and lagging efforts at suicide prevention.
“The state repeatedly has fallen short of its constitutional obligations in a number of critical areas: suicide prevention; the treatment of mentally ill inmates in administrative segregation; those inmates’ access to higher levels of care, including mental health crisis beds; and staffing,” she wrote in her 2023 petition.
Though the Ninth Circuit upheld Mueller’s 2024 contempt finding against California, the appellate panel asked the judge to show calculations for the associated monthly fines, which now exceed $197 million. The amount is intended to reflect the savings the state realizes from leaving prison mental health jobs unfilled.
In 2024, Mueller wrote that the contempt order and fines were having little impact.
“The court has exhausted virtually every mechanism for prodding defendants to finally achieve compliance,” Mueller wrote in a July 2024 order contemplating appointment of a receiver.
In the prison medical care case, the receiver crafted a turnaround plan for the state, ramped up physician salaries and negotiated with the administration for funding to build medical facilities. The medical receiver launched an electronic records system, tackled disease outbreaks including Valley Fever, and even monitored the health of prisoners staging a systemwide hunger strike.
It’s not yet clear what powers a mental health receiver would be given.
As head of the federal prison system under Biden from 2022 to early 2025, Peters confronted issues such as crumbling infrastructure, inadequate staffing and a scandal at a federal women’s prison in Alameda County so beset by allegations of sexual abuse that it was dubbed “the rape club.” She ordered that prison closed down.
Prior to that, she ran Oregon’s state prison system.
When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. convened democracy summits at the White House in 2021 and 2023, he pointedly disinvited President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a man he had once described an “autocrat” who deserved to be driven from office by voters.
On Tuesday, President Trump offered a much rosier assessment of the Turkish president, even as protesters filled the streets following the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan’s chief political rival.
“A good leader,” the president said of Mr. Erdogan during a meeting of his ambassadors at the White House. He made no mention of the arrest or the protests.
Since taking office 66 days ago, Mr. Trump has turned a central precept of American diplomacy on its head. He is embracing — rather than denouncing — fellow leaders who abandon democratic principles. The longstanding bipartisan effort to bolster democratic institutions around the globe has been replaced by a president who praises leaders who move toward autocracy.
And Mr. Trump’s own actions — taking revenge against his political rivals, attacking law firms, journalists and universities, and questioning the authority of the judiciary — are offering new models for democratically elected leaders in countries like Serbia and Israel who have already shown their willingness to push the boundaries of their own institutions.
“There’s a great emboldening,” said Rosa Balfour, the Europe director for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What Trump says reverberates strongly here. But also what the United States does not do. It does not punish or condemn any attempt to undermine rule of law or democracy. There are no repercussions.”
Jane Harman, a former member of Congress and former president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, noted that Mr. Erdogan and other leaders around the world had been “drifting away” from democratic principles for years.
In 2016, a faction in Mr. Erdogan’s government attempted a coup to overthrow him. Since then, he has tightened control of the presidency by attacking the media, political opponents, the courts and other institutions.
“This has become a very different world, but I don’t think Trump started it, and I don’t think Trump is going to end it either,” Ms. Harman said. And she noted that in at least a few places, Mr. Trump’s return to power had prompted some voters to question the authoritarian leanings of candidates and parties.
“Think Germany,” she said, referring to recent elections in the country. “The far right has risen in popularity, but it didn’t win. And the backlash to Trump might have been part of the momentum that held it back.”
Mr. Trump is not the first president to tolerate less-than-democratic actions from allies when they deemed it necessary.
Mr. Biden offered a fist-bump to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, even as he blamed him for the murder of the columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Mr. Biden also worked with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who has increasingly cracked down on dissent in his country, and — at times — with Mr. Erdogan.
But Mr. Trump’s election has coincided with actions by elected leaders that appear to depart from the kind of democratic principles that America stood for.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no longer needs to contend with Mr. Biden’s opposition to a long-planned overhaul of the courts, which many Israelis view as an attempt to control and politicize the judiciary. In 2023, Mr. Biden told reporters that Mr. Netanyahu “cannot continue down this road” of judicial changes.
Now, with Mr. Trump in office, the Israeli leader faces no such pressure. This month, he fired the chief of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, a move seen as undermining its independence. Later, the cabinet approved a vote of no confidence in the country’s attorney general, prompting fresh accusations that Mr. Netanyahu is curbing the independence of the justice system, purging officials he considers disloyal.
On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu’s allies in Parliament voted to give themselves more power over the selection of the country’s judges. The vote came after the prime minister gave a speech echoing Mr. Trump and saying that the action meant that “the deep state is in danger.”
“The U.S. is not going to put any pressure whatsoever on Netanyahu to respect the democratic institutions of his own country,” Ms. Balfour said. “Netanyahu feels that he has impunity in that respect.”
In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vucic has spent years attacking the media and other political opponents. Last month — as Mr. Trump dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development — Mr. Vucic sent police to raid organizations in his country, some of which had received money from the now largely shuttered American agency.
Authorities in Mr. Vucic’s government cited Mr. Trump’s actions in the United States as justification for moving against the organizations, including the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability and Civic Initiatives. They quoted Elon Musk, the multibillionaire who is running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, who claimed, without evidence, that USAID was a “criminal organization.”
Two weeks after the raids in Serbia, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, traveled to Belgrade, the country’s capital, to interview Mr. Vucic for his podcast. In the interview, Mr. Vucic complained that he, like the American president, is opposed by “an entire liberal establishment from Washington and New York and L.A. going against you.” He said the raids of the nongovernmental organizations were designed to root out corruption and financial mismanagement.
Mr. Trump Jr. fawned over Mr. Vucic, describing what he called “an embrace of common sense, an embrace of law and order, of a shared national sense of identity.” He criticized protesters angry about Mr. Vucic’s recent actions.
“I’m sure the media will cover them only one way,” Mr. Trump Jr. said. “And now there’s seemingly evidence that they are all tied in some form to the same left-wing actors here in America. That same propaganda machine.”
The president’s son is not the only one echoing his father’s language.
Last week, after Mr. Erdogan’s government jailed the mayor of Istanbul, one of Mr. Trump’s senior diplomatic envoys spoke positively about Turkey’s leader during an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“Really transformational,” Steve Witkoff said of a recent telephone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan. “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, said Mr. Trump’s words and actions — and those of his surrogates — are being watched by other leaders. She said the president’s lack of condemnation of Mr. Erdogan following the arrest of the Istanbul mayor would have been noted by authoritarian-leaning presidents and prime ministers.
“The moves of Trump in this same direction,” she said, “embolden foreign leaders who know the U.S. is now an autocratic ally and there will be no consequences for repressive behavior.”
President Donald Trump announced Friday he had nominated former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to become the next U.S. ambassador to Serbia.
“Mark is a proud Veteran of the Army National Guard, and previously served as Attorney General for the Great State of Arizona,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
“As the son of refugees who fled communism, Mark will be a strong advocate for Freedom, and always put AMERICA FIRST. Congratulations Mark!”
TRUMP NOMINATES GEORGIA STATE SEN. BRANDON BEACH FOR US TREASURER
Mark Brnovich was nominated to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to Serbia. (Fox News)
Brnovich served as attorney general of Arizona from 2015 to 2023.
He is married to Susan Brnovich, a U.S. District Court judge in Arizona.
SACRAMENTO — Since his podcast debuted in March, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has flummoxed Democrats who fear that the politician they considered a liberal prizefighter is turning MAGA-friendly.
The rap against “This Is Gavin Newsom,” in which the governor spoke out against trans athletes competing in women’s sports and disavowed the gender-inclusive term “Latinx,” is that he doesn’t sound like the Newsom they know at all.
“What in God’s name is going on with Gavin Newsom?” asked CNN anchor Erin Burnett, quoting a headline criticizing the podcast, during a recent segment ripping the governor’s apparent shift.
“The country is trying to figure out how he went from progressive hero and governor of the most liberal state in the country to interviewing and spending time with MAGA favorites like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.”
The Democratic governor was also surprised, but by the response.
“I did what I said I was going to do. I mean, when I launched this, I said I was going to have, not debates with people I disagree with, I said we’re gonna have people on we disagree and agree with to have civil conversations to try to understand each other at this time of such polarization,” Newsom said in an interview with The Times on Friday. “And I said I was going to specifically meet with members of the MAGA movement. And then we did it and people were shocked.”
A common takeaway from the podcast is that Newsom is attempting to shape-shift into a moderate as he gears up to run for president in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2024 election.
Newsom disputed that “exhausting” assumption, which he said others have attributed to actions for more than two decades. The governor offered his own blistering critique of his party to explain why he’s sitting down with controversial GOP figures now.
“Because our party’s getting our ass kicked,” Newsom said. “Because the Democratic Party brand is toxic. Because people don’t think we make any damn sense. They think we make noise. They don’t think we support them. You fill in the generic them. They don’t think we have their values. They think we’re elite. We talk down to people. We talk past people. They think we just think we’re smarter than other people, that we’re so judgmental and full of ourselves.”
The governor paused to say he loves his party, but “we’ve lost our way” and he wants people to know he hears it.
“I think you do that by having people you disagree with [on the podcast] without being disagreeable.”
It’s not the first time the governor has disagreed with his fellow Democrats.
As speculation mounted about whether then-President Biden was fit to run for president last summer, Newsom called the chatter from his own party “unhelpful” and “unnecessary” as he encouraged Democrats to back the president. A year earlier, he scolded the Democratic Party for its passive response to Republicans and for its lack of an offensive political playbook.
Newsom created headlines across the country in the premiere episode of his podcast when he told Kirk, a conservative activist and Trump loyalist, that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” Newsom’s comments represented a clear break from progressives.
The backlash from the left was swift. Newsom was accused of deserting his core LGBTQ+ constituency and flip-flopping after old social media posts surfaced with him expressing support for the California law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown that gave trans students more rights in public schools, including the ability to compete in sports and use bathrooms based on their gender preference.
Newsom’s position aligned with 66% of American adults, who in a Pew Research survey in February said trans athletes should be required to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth.
The governor also was criticized for suggesting, in his podcast with Kirk, that no one in his office used the term “Latinx,” a gender neutral term, to describe Latinos, despite direct quotes of the governor that prove otherwise. A Pew poll from 2024 found that only 4% of Latinos describe themselves as “Latinx.”
Eric Jaye, the chief consultant for Newsom’s 2003 mayoral campaign, said the governor is an astute politician, though he disagreed with his decision to speak out against transgender athletes.
“San Francisco has produced many extraordinary politicians — Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown, Kamala Harris — but in terms of the ability to adapt to changing political times and climes, Gavin Newsom’s head and shoulders above all of them,” Jaye said. “He’s deeply, deeply attuned to which way the political wind is blowing and he has so far shown an extraordinary ability to navigate changing political weather.”
“Now the challenge is, the question will be, at what point does that stop seeming like someone adapted to changing times and start seeming inauthentic, if not outright fake?”
On Friday, Newsom said he understood why people might view his podcast as a departure from his liberal image, shaped largely by his groundbreaking support for gay marriage as mayor of San Francisco and as an advocate for universal healthcare.
But the governor said his politics has never fit into an “ideological prism.”
Anyone who knows him, he said, remembers when he was the “small business supervisor” in San Francisco, raging against the board for raising fees on business owners and championing “Care Not Cash,” a policy to take welfare checks from homeless people and use the savings to pay for treatment options.
“I’m open to argument,” Newsom said. “I’m interested in evidence. I have very strong values. I’m a progressive but I’m a pragmatic one, and that’s something that anyone who has followed me knows, and people that don’t, they’re learning a little bit about that now.”
Still, Newsom always has been the main architect of his public image.
A wine entrepreneur allied with the business community, he ran as a moderate to win the mayor’s office in 2003 against a Green Party candidate. “Care Not Cash” was widely panned by progressives but helped seal his victory.
When Newsom set his sights on the biggest political prize in California in the 2018 governor’s race, he ran as a progressive advocate for single-payer healthcare and pledged to build more affordable housing.
Yet even as he effused his liberal platform, Newsom couldn’t shake criticism from his opponents that his positions were a mirage.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a moderate Democrat, accused Newsom of selling “snake oil” with his support for single-payer healthcare in order to win over the nurses union and progressives.
Newsom delivered some of his campaign pledges in his first term as governor. He successfully advocated for universal preschool and state-sponsored healthcare coverage to all income-eligible Californians regardless of immigration status. He also paused death row executions.
The governor, who has a close relationship with the tech industry and counts Google founder Sergey Brin and Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff as his friends, has shown more of his moderate side in his second term.
He drew criticism from truck drivers for rejecting their push to require more regulation of autonomous big rigs. He vetoed a marquee bill last year that would have required artificial intelligence developers to put safeguards on the technology. Newsom rebuffed Hollywood unions when he rejected a bill that would have allowed workers to receive unemployment benefits when on strike.
He made a show this year of saying he would veto a bill for a second time that sought to restrict the state prison system’s ability to coordinate with federal immigration authorities attempting to deport felons. He’s also rejected proposals to allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to participate in a subsidized home loan program and to allow undocumented students to work at public universities.
Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said she wasn’t shocked to see Newsom appear more moderate on the podcast.
“He has always been more or less a tech bro from Northern California with the same kind of politics as we thought,” Gonzalez said.
Perhaps, she said, “He’s done playing liberal and now he’s just going to be himself.”
Steve Kawa, Newsom’s chief of staff as mayor, scoffed at the idea that Newsom has changed. He said the governor has always been interested in speaking to people on all sides of a policy idea. Politicians, like regular people, aren’t one-dimensional.
“Maybe he’s moderate on this issue,” Kawa said. “Maybe he’s progressive on this issue. I don’t think he looks at it in terms of under what column is this solution to make life better for the public and I can only be in this column.”
To criticism that he appears too comfortable talking to Bannon, a Trump campaign architect, and Kirk one day and Democrats such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and commentator Ezra Klein the next, Newsom said he meets with people he disagrees with all the time. He mentioned his 90-minute sit-down with Trump in the Oval Office.
“That’s called life,” Newsom said. “I don’t decide who my friends are on the basis of their politics. I’d never met Charlie Kirk. I’d never met Bannon, but I know people that think like them and they’re good parents and they’re good people, and I vehemently disagree with their politics and they’re Trumpers.”
The amicability he displayed in the podcast toward Republican figures whom Democrats perceive as villains doesn’t come as a surprise to people who have closely followed his career.
“He sounds evenhanded about the views of people that you would think he would find an anathema to his being. That’s because of how he is on a path of existence beyond politics and I think that’s reflected in the podcast,” said David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University.
“He’s always lived a charmed life in terms of politics, but there’s also been more to him.”
Detroit Tigers Star ‘An Ace in Any Era’ Rightfully Atop Starting Pitcher Rankings
Hurricane Helene survivor endorses Trump admin's plan to nix FEMA after storm devastated Southeast
Summit County’s median home price eclipses San Francisco, Honolulu
How a Former Dolphins Coach Helped Davis Become a Ball Hawk
Cowboys draft polls: 5 draft questions for Dallas on Day 2
-
News1 week agoTrump’s Ending of Hunter Biden’s Security Detail Raises Questions About Who Gets Protection
-
Technology1 week agoStreaming services keep getting more expensive: all the latest price increases
-
Sports1 week agoThe BookKeeper – Exploring Manchester City’s finances during a season of change
-
Business1 week agoTrump Administration Lifts Ban on Sugar Company Central Romana Over Forced Labor
-
News1 week agoNASA Astronauts Don’t Receive Overtime Pay for Space Mission But Get $5 a Day
-
Culture1 week ago‘Can’t-miss’ Men’s NCAA Tournament games on Thursday and Friday: truTV FTW?
-
World1 week ago
Vatican says Pope Francis no longer needs mechanical help to breathe as his health improves
-
Politics1 week agoJD Vance recalls his wife texting him under table at Silicon Valley dinner: 'These people are f—ing crazy'