Be sure to read today's editorial on the health care mess in the California prisons. As I read E.J. Schultz' piece in Sunday's paper on the shoddy health care being given to prisoners at the two women's prisons in Chowchilla, it struck me that this is another example of the state dumping its problems into the Valley. So, you've got a bunch of sick prisoners and nowhere to put them. Dump them in the San Joaquin Valley. Someday, we have to stop allowing this to happen. Someday our representatives have to stand up and say, those patients do not come to my back yard without funding for state-of-the-art care.
When something horrible happens in that prison hospital involving a death from some awful disease that was mismanaged, you know the datelines on the news stories are not going to be Marin or Newport Beach. It's going to be CHOWCHILLA, Madera County. And the maps in newspapers and on TV will spot the location right here. You don't have to be a public relations executive to figure out that people associating "prisons/Madera/crisis" is not going to add up to a good image for us.
And when folks write about prisons, it's not going to be the great innovations going on there, the remarkable state of the art progress being made there. It's going to be about overcrowding, neglect and substandard care. Thanks a lot, superheroes. We really needed that.
I think all the stories related to pathetic prison management should carry the dateline SACRAMENTO.
Good point. But when did Chowchilla become part of Fresno County? (Since the 1800's, anyway.)