How LAT found 30 prison doctors collecting pay while not seeing patients
This photo of the now-closed Alcatraz Prison in California is by Flickr user Tim Pearce, Los Gatos.
Jack Dolan of the Los Angeles Times in July wrote about a prison surgeon who was the highest-paid state employee at $777,423 – although he hadn’t treated an inmate for six years because medical supervisors didn’t trust his clinical skills.
After that story, Jack asked how many other doctors were doing non-medical tasks because they weren’t deemed safe. “Late last week, they sent a list of 30 doctors,” Jack says, who have collected an estimated $8.7 million since 2006. He writes:
“At least 30 medical professionals have collected their six-figure salaries for a cumulative 37 years in a kind of employment limbo after fellow doctors decided they were too dangerous to treat inmates but before the state’s lengthy discipline appeals process made a final decision on whether they should be fired, state records show.”
Jack Dolan
Among them: A doctor who earned $235,000 to deliver mail and another who earned $235,000 to review files in a storage room.
Today’s Tips: Find out who pays state employees and request annual data on salaries.
Jack says he requests payroll data including payments beyond base pay for all government employees every year. For this story, he noted when a job title received higher than normal pay and asked if the person received back pay. The back pay was an indication of someone being fired and rehired.
“It helped a lot to break down their resistance to tell the whole story,” says Jack, who was a 2009 winner of the Reynolds Center’s Barlett & Steele Award for Investigative Business Journalism.
