Emptying out the clown car

“I don’t blame the courts for step­ping in to try to solve the health care cri­sis that we have, the over­crowd­ing cri­sis that we have, because the fact of the mat­ter is, for decades the state of Cal­i­for­nia hasn’t really taken it seriously.”

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

“I fear that today’s deci­sion will lead to a grim ros­ter of vic­tims. I hope that I am wrong.”

— Jus­tice Samuel Alito

Dis­sent­ing in Brown v. Plata

In 1884 William Wash­ing­ton Cole began cir­cus per­for­mances that he called “new colos­sal shows.” Tour­ing the nation on train cars and per­form­ing under the big top he com­peted with the likes of P.T. Bar­num for the ticket sales of the cir­cus going Amer­i­can pub­lic. When he died in 1915 he was worth more than five mil­lion dollars.

The cir­cus, which is now one of the few that still per­forms in tents, was even­tu­ally sold, but in the 1950s it began a new cir­cus tra­di­tion– the clown car. Dri­ving into the tent in a small vehi­cle, a ridicu­lous num­ber of clowns would pile out of the car– seem­ingly end­lessly– as enter­tained circus-goers mar­veled at the num­ber of clowns who fit into such a small space.

The State of Cal­i­for­nia has a sim­i­lar prob­lem. It doesn’t involve clowns and it doesn’t involve cars, but it does involve a huge num­ber of peo­ple in a space that was not intended to hold them. Unfor­tu­nately for Cal­i­for­nia, the space is its prison sys­tem and the peo­ple crammed into it are felons.

California’s pris­ons are designed to hold just under 80,000 inmates. Since 2000 they have been run­ning at nearly 200% capac­ity and accord­ing to a study con­ducted by the Pew Cen­ter, they held 169,000 peo­ple as of Jan­u­ary 2010. Only Texas has a larger prison pop­u­la­tion (just barely) and the only other state with more than 100,000 inmates is Florida at 104,000. For com­par­a­tive pur­poses, Ohio’s prison sys­tem held 51,606 pris­on­ers as of Jan­u­ary 2010.

Two fed­eral class action law­suits were filed by or on behalf of Cal­i­for­nia inmates in 1990 claim­ing that they were not receiv­ing or were receiv­ing inad­e­quate men­tal health and med­ical care as a result of prison over­crowd­ing. After twelve years of lit­i­ga­tion and nego­ti­a­tions, a spe­cial mas­ter appointed by the court pro­vided a report that said that the sit­u­a­tion had actu­ally got­ten worse since the law­suit was filed.

As a result a new law­suit was filed in 2006 under the name of inmate Mar­ciano Plata, who had been the named plain­tiff in the prior law­suit. The cases were brought under the Prison Lit­i­ga­tion Reform Act, passed by Con­gress to gov­ern exactly this type of law­suit. Under the terms of the Prison Lit­i­ga­tion Reform Act, severe prison over­crowd­ing could be solved by a court order to reduce the prison pop­u­la­tion, but that court order could only come from a three-judge fed­eral dis­trict panel and not from a sin­gle fed­eral judge pre­sid­ing alone.

It should be noted that the cases were not con­cerned with the com­fort or ameni­ties offered to the pris­on­ers. They weren’t about whether there was cable tele­vi­sion or whether double-bunking of beds was nec­es­sary. The cases estab­lished that not only were the pris­ons run­ning at 200% of capac­ity but that med­ical and psy­cho­log­i­cal posi­tions were under­staffed by up to 50%, that ini­tial screen­ing of pris­on­ers for med­ical con­di­tions includ­ing con­ta­gious dis­eases could not be com­pleted in a timely man­ner and that pris­on­ers had died because of delays in emer­gency med­ical care that stretched for as long as five weeks and a fail­ure to diag­nose every­thing from heart attacks to cancer.

Dur­ing his time as Gov­er­nor, Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger had repeat­edly stated that the prison sys­tem was being crushed under its own weight but because of California’s extreme bud­get dif­fi­cul­ties, lit­tle could be done. In August of 2009 the three judge panel ordered the state to reduce its prison pop­u­la­tion to no more than 137% of capac­ity and out­lined five spe­cific meth­ods to achieve that goal. The State appealed that order.

On Tues­day of this week the United States Supreme Court, by a 5–4 mar­gin, upheld that deci­sion, find­ing that there was no rea­son­able dis­pute as to the exis­tence of the over­crowd­ing or the med­ical results of that over­crowd­ing and fur­ther find­ing that reduc­ing the prison pop­u­la­tion was the only avail­able solu­tion to the prob­lem. As a result, the State of Cal­i­for­nia now has two years (it can ask for an exten­sion) to reduce the prison pop­u­la­tion in accor­dance with the order.

The full text of the Supreme Court deci­sion can be read on their web­site, supremecourt.gov. Var­i­ous doc­u­ments, includ­ing all of the briefs filed in the case can be found at scotusblog.com.

David Hej­manowski is a Mag­is­trate and Court Admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer Assis­tant Pros­e­cut­ing Attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on May 26 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.