High court to Calif: Cut prison inmates by 30,000

MARK SHERMAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Mon­day nar­rowly endorsed reduc­ing California’s cramped prison pop­u­la­tion by more than 30,000 inmates to fix some­times deadly prob­lems in med­ical care, rul­ing that fed­eral judges retain enor­mous power to over­see trou­bled state prisons.

The court said in a 5–4 deci­sion that the reduc­tion is “required by the Con­sti­tu­tion” to cor­rect long­stand­ing vio­la­tions of inmates’ rights to ade­quate care for their men­tal and phys­i­cal health. In 2009, the state’s pris­ons aver­aged nearly a death a week that might have been pre­vented or delayed with bet­ter med­ical care.

The order man­dates a prison pop­u­la­tion of no more than 110,000 inmates, still far above the 80,000 the sys­tem was designed to hold.

There were more than 143,000 inmates in California’s 33 adult pris­ons as of May 11, so roughly 33,000 inmates will need to be trans­ferred to other juris­dic­tions or released.

“The vio­la­tions have per­sisted for years. They remain uncor­rected,” Jus­tice Anthony Kennedy, a Cal­i­for­nia native, wrote for the court. The law­suit chal­leng­ing the ade­quacy of men­tal health care was filed in 1990.

To empha­size the con­di­tions, Kennedy took the unusual step of includ­ing pho­tos of over­crowd­ing, includ­ing cages where men­tally ill inmates were held while they awaited a bed.

The court’s four Demo­c­ra­tic appointees joined with Kennedy in uphold­ing a court order issued by three fed­eral judges in Cal­i­for­nia, all appointees of Pres­i­dent Jimmy Carter.

Jus­tice Antonin Scalia said in dis­sent that the court order is “per­haps the most rad­i­cal injunc­tion issued by a court in our nation’s his­tory” and that it did not com­ply with the Prison Lit­i­ga­tion Reform Act, a 15-year-old law intended to limit the dis­cre­tion of judges in law­suits over prison conditions.

Scalia, read­ing his dis­sent aloud Mon­day, said it would require the release of “the stag­ger­ing num­ber of 46,000 con­victed felons.”

Scalia’s num­ber, cited in legal fil­ings, comes from a period in which the prison pop­u­la­tion was even higher.

Jus­tice Clarence Thomas joined Scalia’s opin­ion, while Jus­tice Samuel Alito wrote a sep­a­rate dis­sent for him­self and Chief Jus­tice John Roberts.

Michael Bien, one of the lawyers rep­re­sent­ing inmates in the case, said, “The Supreme Court upheld an extra­or­di­nary rem­edy because con­di­tions were so terrible.”

The rul­ing comes amid efforts in many states, accel­er­ated by bud­get gaps, to send fewer peo­ple to prison in the first place. Pro­pos­als vary by state, but include ways to reduce sen­tences for lower-level offend­ers, direct some offend­ers to alter­na­tive sen­tenc­ing pro­grams and give judges more dis­cre­tion in sentencing.

“There’s a grow­ing con­sen­sus that there are bet­ter ways to run crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tems,” said Michael Mush­lin, an expert on pris­on­ers’ rights at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y.

Eigh­teen other states joined Cal­i­for­nia in urg­ing the jus­tices to reject the pop­u­la­tion order as over­reach­ing. They argued that it poses a threat to pub­lic safety. State attor­neys gen­eral said they could face sim­i­lar legal challenges.

Alito said he, too, feared that the deci­sion, “like prior pris­oner release orders, will lead to a grim ros­ter of vic­tims. I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see.”

Kennedy acknowl­edged the con­cern, but said the judges gave state offi­cials flex­i­bil­ity in com­ply­ing with the court order, includ­ing offer­ing “early release only to those pris­on­ers who pose the least risk of reoffending.”

Cal­i­for­nia Gov. Jerry Brown said he “will take all steps nec­es­sary to pro­tect pub­lic safety.”

The Cal­i­for­nia dis­pute is the first high court case that reviewed a pris­oner release order under the 1996 fed­eral law, which also made it much harder for inmates to chal­lenge prison conditions.

The state has protested a court order to cut the pop­u­la­tion to around 110,000 inmates within two years, but also has taken steps to meet, if not exceed, that tar­get. Kennedy said the state also could ask the lower court for more time to reach the goal.

Ear­lier this year, Brown signed a bill that would reduce the prison pop­u­la­tion by about 40,000 inmates by trans­fer­ring many low-level offend­ers to county juris­dic­tion. The state leg­is­la­ture has yet to autho­rize any money for the transfer.

A per­son appointed by fed­eral judges now over­sees prison med­ical oper­a­tions, but the judges have said the key to improv­ing health care is to reduce the num­ber of inmates.

At the peak of the over­crowd­ing, nearly 20,000 inmates were liv­ing in makeshift hous­ing in gym­na­si­ums and other com­mon areas, often sleep­ing in bunks stacked three high. Another 10,000 inmates were in fire­fight­ing camps or pri­vate lock­ups within California.

In 2006, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger used his emer­gency pow­ers to begin ship­ping inmates to pri­vate pris­ons in Ari­zona, Mis­sis­sippi and Okla­homa. More than 10,000 Cal­i­for­nia inmates are now housed in pri­vate pris­ons out of state.

Schwarzeneg­ger also sought to reduce the inmate pop­u­la­tion by sign­ing leg­is­la­tion that increased early release cred­its and made it more dif­fi­cult to send ex-convicts back to prison for parole vio­la­tions. Another law rewards county pro­ba­tion depart­ments for keep­ing crim­i­nals out of state prisons.

One result of those changes is that the state has been able to do away with nearly two-thirds of its makeshift beds, although more than 7,000 inmates remain in tem­po­rary housing.

Posted by AP News on May 23 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.