page_title: California Medical Facility
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: California Medical Facility / History
caption_attribution_description: English: California Medical Facility entrance sign.
context_page_description: California Medical Facility is a male-only state prison medical facility located in the city of Vacaville, Solano County, California. It is older than California State Prison, Solano, the other state prison in Vacaville.
context_section_description: CMF opened in 1955.
  Among other programs at CMF, the Volunteers of Vacaville began in 1960 as a cooperative effort between the community, staff, and inmates. Inmates who participate in the Volunteers of Vacaville's Blind Project create audiobooks, transcribe books into Braille, clean and repair Perkins Brailler machines, and resurface eyeglasses. The initial goal of this organization was to transcribe books onto audiotape for the blind community outside of the prison. The Blind Project has since grown into a nationally and internationally recognized leader in blind services.
  In 1984, the California prison system's first AIDS case was treated at CMF, and later the system's first specialized AIDS facilities were developed there.
  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the quality of medical care at CMF was found to be lacking, as evidenced by the following:
  After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice sent a January 1987 letter to then-Governor George Deukmejian stating that CMF "deprive[s] inmates of their right to be free from deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs."
  A 1988 lawsuit charged that CMF was "a filthy, vermin-infested, overcrowded prison," and that medical care there was "grossly inadequate." Although at the time "all inmates in California prisons" with HIV/AIDS were sent to CMF, the suit claimed that "overcrowded housing and medical conditions in the AIDS wing are worse than in the main prison." A 1990 consent decree caused CMF's healthcare to "operat[e] under a separate set of rules and with supervision by a court-appointed expert," but a 1998 agreement "plac[ed] the medical and psychiatric care at the facility under the same rules and guidelines as those affecting the rest of the state prison system."
  A 1989 lawsuit by HIV-infected inmates at CMF claimed that separate housing limited their access to prison services (such as recreation, visitation, and jobs) and subjected them to "unnecessary mental anguish." A consent decree led to a pilot program to integrate up to 30 of the 140 HIV-infected inmates at Vacaville [i.e., CMF] into the prison's general population.
  In spring 1992, the two top HIV specialists at the prison resigned, frustrated by limited resources and what they described as "institutionalized apathy" toward AIDS among inmates." The California State Assembly's Public Safety Committee wrote a 1992 report criticizing the care of inmates with HIV or disabilities at CMF. By January 1993, CMF had embarked on a $5.8 million plan to improve the care of AIDS patients, including "a renovated housing unit, a hospice, an enlarged staff, an ombudsman to hear complaints, warmer clothes and nutritional supplements and sensitivity training for guards.
  In 1996 at CMF, a 17-bed, state-licensed hospice began caring for dying inmates which was the first hospice among California prisons. Due to an increasing population of elderly at CMF, a nursing home with 21 beds opened in September 2005 as a pilot program.
caption: California Medical Facility entrance sign
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