People who spent time in Monterey County jail are in for a little cash Health care provider is paying up for poor performance

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By Royal Calkins

Here’s some rare good news for current and past inmates of the Monterey County jail.

A federal judge on Thursday approved a plan to divide among them nearly $2.5 million in fines to be paid by the jail’s longtime health care provider.

The not-so-good news: As many as 35,000 people will be eligible to claim a share of the pot, which works out to only about $70 apiece if all apply. Former prisoners who spent months or years in the jail system will qualify for more, short-timers for less. The judge is expected next week to set a minimum and maximum amount that any individuals will receive. Eligible people must have been incarcerated in a Monterey County jail facility between May 27, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2025.

The money is coming from a national medical company, Wellpath, which for more than a decade has provided documentably terrible care to those housed in the county’s lockups in Salinas. According to inspection reports from court-appointed health professionals, the company’s years working for the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office featured inadequate admission examinations, delayed doctors’ visits, neglected prescriptions and token psychiatric care. That all resulted in a settlement agreement between Wellpath and lawyers for the inmates, which has led to a formula for how much the hedge-fund-owned company should pay to make up for its failings.

Instead of payments to former and current prisoners, the federal court had considered sending the money to the Community Foundation for Monterey County for distribution to nonprofit organizations serving the needs of the incarcerated. After news of that possibility reached the jail, the court was flooded with more than 250 letters from past and present inmates supporting the direct payment plan adopted Thursday by U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman. Several inmates complained in their letters that medical care in the jail remains substandard, though the pace of inmate deaths has slowed in the past couple of years.

Court documents about the settlement refer to Wellpath as California Forensics Medical Group, or CFMG, which was initially awarded the local contract years ago and was later folded into the Wellpath structure. Wellpath, based in Nashville, Tenn., is one of the largest health care providers for jail and prison inmates nationwide and, like many of its competitors, it has been judged by the courts to provide inadequate and even dangerous levels of service.

Among the impediments to better care, of course, are the unwillingness of local and state governments to pay providers more for appropriate care, the public’s relative lack of concern for the health of prisoners — either people convicted of crimes or men and women awaiting trial — and the difficulty finding nurses or other medical professionals willing to work in carceral settings.

Aggravating the problem has been the recent entry of hedge funds into the field of inmate medicine. Hedge funds like Wellpath’s ownership are investment pools — usually involving high-income investors and institutions — that promise generous returns, a strategy that relies on keeping costs as low as possible. While many counties and state governments have sought to economize by keeping health care contracts as inexpensive as possible, many have been bitten by that strategy because it led to expensive settlements and judgments over jailhouse deaths.

Though it maintains contracts with most California counties, Wellpath is now gone from Monterey County. It has been replaced by a new company, Correctional Healthcare Partners (CHP) of San Diego. Perhaps more good news: It isn’t a hedge fund. The new provider has contracts in San Diego, Amador, Yuba and Monterey counties but hasn’t yet established much of a track record in any of those places.

Testing the theory that more money translates into better care, CHP’s contract with Monterey County could pay it up to $27.8 million a year if the company provides the number of employees it promises. That’s nearly double the amount Wellpath was receiving while providing seriously smaller medical staffs.

Monterey County, like most counties with jails, has paid out many millions of dollars over the years because of wrongful death lawsuits and other claims challenging the quality of care.

The settlement money is a result of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 on behalf of former inmate Jesse Hernandez and all other inmates of the county jail. The suit in federal court in San Francisco resulted in regular jail inspections by doctors, dentists and other professionals approved by the court. The reports regularly documented undue delays in care, inadequate care and avoidance of hospital care caused by the requirement that Wellpath had to pay for much of it out of its own treasury.

The San Francisco law firm of Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld played a lead role representing the inmates past and present, working closely with lawyers from the Prison Law Office and the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s not well known that jail and prison inmates have constitutional rights to proper health care because they are in government custody.

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