“CIIC’s work and prison oversight in general is critically important,” her resignation letter says.
In return, her letter said lawmakers agreed to scale back proposed legislation that would have replaced the bi-partisan agency with another effectively under Republican control. The new agency wouldn’t be mandated to conduct inspections, wouldn’t inspect private prisons, would have a limited scope of inspections, and would face requirements some say would make it more difficult for inspections to take place at all.
The amendment was proposed Tuesday and set for a vote late Wednesday, prompting Saul to pen an open letter saying the changes would effectively end state inspections of prisons for inhumane conditions, violence, rape and medical neglect.
“Please do not take a legislative committee with 40 years of history and scrap it in less than 24 hours,” she wrote.
The CIIC’s website gives former Dayton Rep. C.J. McLin, Jr. credit for creating it in 1977.
Support for maintaining the CIIC came from groups including the Ohio Public Defender, American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, the Juvenile Justice Coalition, and the state’s largest public employees union.
Saul claims the amendment is in response to the CIIC pushing back against efforts by the Kasich administration to limit her access to inmate health records.
“I particularly asked questions after two inmates died last fall – one due to medical neglect and the other due to suicide after being repeatedly sexually pressured at multiple institutions,” she wrote. “Rather than being open and transparent, the (Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections) prohibited all medical and mental health staff from even speaking to us about anything other than facilities and staffing.”
ODRC Spokeswoman JoEllen Smith responded with this statement: “We have always and will always comply with regulatory oversight panels in a transparent manner consistent with state and federal privacy laws. How the legislature wishes to structure that oversight is their purview. DRC is not permitted to provide access to inmate medical records to the CIIC or any other person or organization not authorized by current Ohio law.”
Sen. Cliff Hite, R-Findlay, chairman of the CIIC, said he “wasn’t part of the process” in redefining the CIIC but that there have been problems with a lack of clarity on its role.
“There have been rumblings from within our own CIIC organization of helping define our purview and what we can and cannot do based on what the revised code says, and there have been differences of opinion,” he said. “Medical records was one of those.”
But he praised the agency’s work, saying “Inspections need to be done. And DRC wants inspections.”
Ohio Public Defender Tim Young said the committee proposed to replace the CIIC “cannot succeed and will expose Ohio to a substantial risk of litigation.”
CIIC inspections have found multiple including violence, contraband, improper staff-inmate relationships and delayed access to mental health care at prisons across Ohio including Dayton Correctional Institution and Lebanon Correctional Institution.
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