Its Prisons Dangerously Full, Why Is CA Fighting for Custody of a Dying Prisoner Across the Country?

With Its Prisons Dangerously Full, Why Is California Fighting for Custody of a Dying Prisoner Across the Country?

By Jessica Pupovac and Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted September 12, 2009.

While other states release low-risk, high-cost prisoners, CA officials want to jail another terminal prisoner, on taxpayers' dime.




Gloria Johnson-Ester was on her way to church early on November 2, 2008, when she received a phone call telling her that her son's prison sentence had been commuted, and he would be coming home after spending the last 15 years behind bars.

"I just went to church and cried and couldn't sit still. I just got overjoyed," she recalls, beaming. "I thought, 'He's free! He's free!'"

Her son, Montell Johnson, is terminally ill, struggling through the advanced stages of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. According to the phone call to his mother, his condition had convinced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to grant him a rare executive clemency order, which commuted his sentence to time served.

The day after she got the good news, Johnson-Ester raced to government and social service agencies all over Chicago, applying for social security and Medicare benefits for him and trying to piece together a plan to care for him at her home on the South Side, where she lives alone. She cleared out her dining room to create a makeshift hospital room. When a parole officer called her to find out where Montell was going to live, she gladly reported that he would be staying with his mother. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/142573/with_its_prisons_dangerously_full%2C_why_is_california_fighting_for_custody_of_a_dying_prisoner_across_the_country/

What a crock of shit. The state of California has money for this but not for anything else.

it is a shame that his mother has to drive from chicago but at least the warden will let her take care of him.

http://www.idoc.state.il.us/subsections/facilities/information.asp?instchoice=she

california is a third world country.

(I'm assuming he could step in...)

Just had to say it.

I know. Obama says that once on the net, it's there forever.

I'm too old, tired and sore to give a shit.