Saturday Data: Mental Health and Alabama Prisons

     A Judge has cleared the way for a class action lawsuit against the always underfunded, always overcrowded prison system because of the mental health treatment not being provided to inmates.
     The suit was filed by The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, which quotes the judge in an article about the decision on their website:  

“When prison mental health administrators know and communicate that they need more staff to provide appropriate care for prisoners, and the Commissioner refuses to provide funding for this staff, not in any exercise of medical judgment but because he does not have the money this suffices to establish deliberate indifference and – in conjunction with a showing that this creates a substantial risk of serious harm– to establish an Eighth Amendment violation.”