Dr. Raymond Patterson said it before—over and over again for years—but he probably won’t be saying it again: California prison conditions are so bad, they lead to an intolerably high inmate suicide rate.

On Wednesday, the court-appoint mental health expert filed yet another scathing report , with five other experts, on the state’s miserably overcrowded prisons and said it would be his last because “further recommendations are futile.”

Patterson, who has been at it for 14 years, said in the report that he is tired of having his recommendations “go unheeded, year after year, while the suicides among CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] inmates continue unabated, and is worsening.” He concluded that prison officials are “disingenuous” about their supposed concern about prison suicides.

Governor Jerry Brown and the federal courts are in the midst of a showdown over continued oversight of the state prisons. The federal government has been in charge of prison healthcare since 2005 and overcrowding since 2009. In response to federal directives, the state has begun a realignment of inmates from prisons to already-overcrowded local jails. As a result, the prison population has been reduced from 161,000 to 120,000.

The state currently holds around 12,000 people in some form of isolation and 4,000 in long-term solitary confinement. Around 100 people have spent 20 years or more in isolated conditions, according to California Prison Watch. The Los Angeles Times reported earlier in the month that the administration suppressed a report by national suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes in 2011 that the system for holding suicidal patients in tiny, filthy, airless holding cells contributed to them committing suicide.

The court-appointed monitor, Special Master Matthew Lopes, has noted that there were 32 suicides in California prisons in 2012, a 13% increase over the year before and nearly double the national prison suicide rate.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton, who is presiding over the state prison situation, has ordered the state to come up with a plan by June to further reduce the population and improve inmate health care. Governor Brown declared the “prison crisis” over in January and said the state was done pouring money down “a rathole of incarceration.” He said the cost of prisoner health care had skyrocketed from $700 million a year to $2 billion.

The state will make its case on March 27 when oral arguments are scheduled to begin.

–Ken Broder

To Learn More:

Expert Hired to Help Lower Suicide Rate in State Prisons Gives Up (by Julie Small, KPCC)

Court-Appointed Expert Blasts California Effort on Prison Suicides (by Paige St. John, Los Angeles Times)

California Governor Calls Federal Prison Oversight Wasteful (by Denny Walsh and Sam Stanton, McClatchy News)

State Officials, Fighting to Regain Control of Prisons, Tried to Hide Inmate Suicide Report (by Ken Broder, AllGov California)