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Civil detainees at California's Coalinga State Hospital are in their second month of a strike, protesting the conditions at the understaffed facility and "treatment" protocols that make it all-but impossible for them to gain their freedom. Coalinga houses more than 600 men who have completed prison sentences for sex crimes, but who remain incarcerated under California's civil-commitment law.

According to organizers, about three-quarters of those incarcerated in the Coalinga facility are participating in some way with the strike, which began August 6. Strikers are refusing to take part in the facility's activities and treatment programs, and are displaying "protest tags" carrying slogans such as "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." On September 2, over a dozen Coalinga detainees ratcheted up the protest by undertaking a hunger strike, vowing to refuse food until conditions are improved.

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ccording to detainee Michael St. Martin, a five-year veteran of the institution, the goal of the strike is to "stop them [Coalinga] from showing [state officials in] Sacramento that they have a viable program."

Strikers may be meeting with some success: the hospital has replaced two executive directors in the last month and none of the executive staff listed on the facility's webpage are still employed there. Repeated Guide calls -- all unreturned -- to the current acting executive director Norman Kramer were referred to Janine Stanley-Wallace, the "acting director of external communications," though in her voicemail message she identifies herself as the hospital's "litigation coordinator."

While strike organizers report that as many as one-half of the guards, termed "custody police," are sympathetic, there has been harassment and opposition -- sometimes violent -- to the strike.

"I was waiting outside the program office," says James Hydrick, a detainee civilly incarcerated since 1998, "to report an assault on another patient. I had a wallet-sized sign attached to my journal that said, 'I cannot be silenced... stop the injustice.' [A guard] bumped into me, trying to provoke a response. He tried to snatch my sign, and ended up putting me in a choke hold, and knocked me almost unconscious. I complained I couldn't breath. He said, 'That's the point, you son of a bitch.'"

Legal fictions

The Coalinga facility was completed in 2005 at a cost of $388 million, and was designed to house the rapidly-growing population of persons convicted of illegal sex who have completed their prison sentences but remain incarcerated as "Sexual Violent Predators" whether or not any violence was involved in their crime. (Indeed, estimates from two detainees suggest that a majority of Coalinga's population were incarcerated for non-violent, same-sex crimes.)

An extension of a court-determined prison sentence would not be legal, so state officials maintain that facilities like Coalinga provide "treatment" that does not constitute further "punishment."

This legal fiction was upheld in a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kansas v. Hendricks. Writing for the 5 to 4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas ruled that indefinite civil confinement is not punishment.

The decision ran roughshod over intuition and centuries of legal precedent. The court asserted that locking up sane people in mental hospitals after they've served a prison sentence for a crime is not double jeopardy (two punishments for the same offense), that invoking a law passed years after a person's conviction to confine him when his sentence ends is not ex post facto punishment (a new penalty devised and imposed after an act was committed), and that making indefinite confinement contingent on having a "mental abnormality" or "personality disorder" -- subjective terms with no clear legal or medical definitions -- does not violate the right to due process. Anticipating Guantanamo, the Supreme Court's ruling overturned what had been a fundamental tenet of jurisprudence: that people are punished for crimes the state proved they committed, not crimes the state contends they might commit in the future.

Lining pockets?

Such legal prevarications are the genesis of the Coalinga strikers' key protest: though the law maintains they are citizens in a hospital receiving treatment, they are, in fact, inmates in a prison being subjected to degrading abuse.

"Coalinga is a containment program, not a treatment program," St. Martin maintains.

According to several detainees, less than a handful of the over 1000 sex offenders held past completion of their prison terms (at Coalinga and other facilities) have ever been released. Noting that the state-paid clinicians have little incentive to ever okay a patient's release, detainee Chris Lawrence calls the clinical assessment process "a circular money game."

Coalinga receives about $200,000 per patient per year, far above the cost of prison incarceration. Wherever this money is going, it isn't into patient treatment, alleges Lawrence: "It's a fraud by the Department of Mental Health."

In their press release, strikers allege that "bingo, conga drumming, mural painting, and popcorn snacking are often [claimed] in reports to be 'treatment' in the continuous challenge [the] Administration faces in justifying the hospital's existence as a treatment facility. While many suspect outright fraud in these 'treatment' expenditures, they have received no scrutiny by state regulators or the legislature."

Coalinga strikers also allege "abysmal medical care" wherein "life-threatening illnesses are often ignored or inadequately treated." Additionally, they claim that there is such rapid turnover in staff that no meaningful therapeutic relationship can be established (a point seemingly validated by the amount of space on the facility's website dedicated to luring would-be employees to its evidently inhospitable location, billing itself as "the economic engine of the Central Valley").

"People quit and leave faster than they can hire them," St. Martin notes. "People are being promoted past their level of incompetence."

Those seeking updates on the strike and conditions at Coalinga can e-mail detainees@gmail.com or browse sexgulag.org

Author Profile:  French Wall
French Wall is the managing editor of The Guide
Email:	french@guidemag.com