November 30, 2010 | 1:28 PM | By

Explainer: Why California may release 40,000 inmates

FILED UNDER: Corrections, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Prison Overcrowding, US Supreme Court

Rina Palta

Attorneys from the Prison Law Office decompress after facing the US Supreme Court this morning.

The story of Schwarzenegger v. Coleman and Plata, a case argued before the US Supreme Court this morning, involves a lot of things: states’ rights versus the rights of their citizens, tough on crime policies that have stuffed the nation’s prisons with inmates, and budget cuts and budget priorities that have kept legislatures from building proper facilities to house and care for prisoners. Most of all, however, the case is about a 1996 federal law called the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). At the moment, California stands to be the first state to unwillingly be ordered to reduce its prison population since the act passed. In 2009, a panel of three federal judges decided that conditions in the state’s prisons are so bad, that the state must release between 35,000-40,000 inmates in order to bring the system into compliance with the US Constitution. Now, the Supreme Court must decide if the panel of judges was in compliance with the PLRA when it issued that order. Here’s what you need to know to understand the case.

The back story

Between 1980 and 1996, the number of people behind bars around the country jumped from 500,000 to 1.6 million. Federal judges in places like Texas, Alabama and Louisiana found that unsustainable. They told states they could only keep people behind bars if they could house them properly because prisons were starting to get jammed–crowded, unsafe, and unsanitary. Barry Krisberg, a senior fellow with the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, says, “in the 80s and 90s there were quite a few prison caps that were implemented around the country.” That means judges were stepping in and telling states and counties that they had to cut their prison populations to make sure they weren’t overcrowding to the point that conditions became unconstitutional–meaning they violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Krisberg says federal lawmakers saw what the courts were doing and decided they were going too far. So in 1996 they passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA).

Krisberg says in part, the PLRA was meant to discourage prisoners from filing frivolous lawsuits. He says it was also about making it harder for federal judges to intervene in state prison systems–particularly, it makes it very, very difficult for judges to tell states to cut down their prison populations. Under the law, a panel of three federal judges must find: that courts have tried all other options and failed to remedy constitutional violations with less intrusive orders; that overcrowding is the primary cause of unconstitutional conditions; that releasing prisoners will have little or no impact on public safety.

“Since it passed, there’s been no state system that’s really been under this umbrella,” Krisberg says. “So in one sense, it produced a chilling end to litigation on behalf of prisoner rights.”

Some other localities have been sued under the PLRA and have resulted in settlements between carceral systems and plaintiffs. California’s case will be the first to test the boundaries of the PLRA at the US Supreme Court and if it stands, California’s will be the first prison cap issued by a federal court since the law passed.

So how did we get here?

Recently,  I visited San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, to get a better sense of how this whole thing started. Lieutenant Sam Robinson, the prison’s public information officer, says in 1885, San Quentin did something no other prison in the country had done: it built a hospital.

“We were forward thinking to do so,” Robinson says. “In that if you’re going to house someone long term, you need to provide some type of health care services to them.

Other prisons around the country followed San Quentin’s example. But over the next century, prison populations grew, and medical and mental health facilities didn’t keep up. By 2006, some California prisons were housing three times as many inmates as they were designed for. Dr. Lisa Pratt, the Chief Physician at San Quentin, says her and other doctors were seeing patients in converted showers and closets–places that don’t allow for things like patient confidentiality or even places for doctors to wash their hands.

There wasn’t enough staff to get inmates from place to place and about half weren’t making it to their doctors’ appointments. Many diabetics weren’t getting their insulin, many mentally ill patients weren’t taking their anti-psychotic drugs. Crowded conditions were making more and more people susceptible to communicable diseases, which meant prisons would go into lockdown just to stop them from spreading. There are numerous examples of overcrowded conditions hampering medical care–like one case, where an inmate living in a gym converted to a dorm of bunk beds (as is now common) was beaten; guards didn’t notice anything until they found him dead. In 2005, an inmate was needlessly dying every six or seven days. Pratt says the doctors did their best, but it wasn’t pretty.

“It was a little bit like field medicine,” she says. “Kind of a Doctors without Borders right here in Marin County.”

Meanwhile, federal courts have been aware of California’s prison problems for decades. In the 1991 Coleman case, which deals with mental health care, a federal court issued over 70 orders to fix the system. In the 2001 Plata case, a federal court ordered improvements to medical care in prisons. Changes were slow to come, and by 2005, the court said it had had enough and appointed a federal receiver to take charge of the system–someone who would run the medical care system in California’s prisons and answer to and be invested with the power of the court.

The state makes progress. Is it enough?

Since the Receiver came to town, a lot has happened. Namely, the state built a shiny new medical facility at San Quentin, which when you tour it, looks like a Kaiser clinic (which isn’t surprising, since it was partially designed by a Kaiser person). In addition, Carter Phillips, the DC attorney who the state retained to fight its battle at the Supreme Court, told me the state has spent some $3.5 billion on upgrading medical care (albeit generally only after being explicitly forced to by a court). The current receiver, Clark Kelso, has plans to digitize inmate medical records (there are currently about four football fields worth of old paper records to convert) so that medical history can follow inmates as they transfer institutions. He’s also instituting a centralized pharmacy to supply medications and renovating existing medical clinics as budget permits. Earlier this month, the state broke ground on a big project: a new prison hospital in Stockton.

San Quentin’s medical facility is now looking to get accredited as a hospital–which would mean proving it complies with national standards for care. That would potentially make the facility the standard for California’s prison system, which it currently isn’t. San Quentin’s facilities look great, but that doesn’t mean prisoners around the state enjoy the same level of care. After the budget crisis hit the state, prison medical care dropped lower on a long list of monetary priorities.

Somewhere in the midst of these successes and setbacks, the judges in the Plata and Coleman cases decided something huge: that there was no way the problems of suicides and needless deaths would go away until California fixed (or at least substantially reduced) its overcrowded conditions. Under the PLRA, they convened a three-judge panel to determine whether or not overcrowding in California’s prisons fundamentally impeded the state’s ability to get its medical and mental health care up to code. And in August of 2009, they decided it did, and issued an order for California to cap its population at 137.5 percent of designed capacity. Which means releasing about 40,000 inmates over the next two years and figuring out how to keep the population from ballooning again.

California’s prison overcrowding reaches the US Supreme Court

Which brings us to this morning, when lawyers for prisoners and lawyers for the state of California presented their cases to the US Supreme Court, which will ultimately decide whether this prison population cap order stands. Don Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office in Berkeley (who’s been on these cases since the beginning) represented California prisoners; Carter Phillips, a prominent DC lawyer represented the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The meat of the fight got back to the Prison Litigation Reform Act and what the law was meant to do. Phillips argued that the federal court “jumped the gun” when it decided to convene a three-judge panel. The PLRA, after all, was designed to make a population cap a last, extreme resort for judges, and the three-judge panel was convened fairly shortly after the court took the already potent move of appointing a receiver to take over the medical care system. Why not let the receiver’s plans play their course before jumping to a prison release order, Phillips asked.

Because, Specter countered, the state has had ample opportunity to step in and fix the situation. Both cases have been rolling for years, the Coleman case for decades. There’s a lengthy trail of federal orders that have failed to bring about constitutional compliance. When is enough enough? As Justice Sotomayor, who stepped in often with questions that seemed to show her support for the population cap, asked, would the state really be able to accomplish in 2 years what they haven’t yet done in 20?

Justice Alito, meanwhile, stepped in often with questions that aided Phillips in his arguments on behalf of the prison system. Namely, the issue of public safety, and whether or not the release order could meet the PLRA’s criteria, which is that it would have little or no impact on public safety.

Specter, the prisoners’ attorney, pointed out that the state releases some 120,000 prisoners every year as it is.

Specter seemed to be grappling with how to explain the nature of California’s prison system to a panel that has (I’m guessing) never set foot inside a gym with stacks of inmates crammed into bunk beds. “You don’t understand,” he told justices at numerous points. Justice Breyer, however, said he understood better after going online and looking at photos from California prisons.

“The pictures look pretty horrendous to me,” Breyer said. “It’s obvious if you just look at it that you cannot have mental health facilities that keep people from killing themselves or medical care that will prevent staph infections.” The three-judge court found that the only way to even start getting to that point is to reduce the prison population, and Breyer indicated he agreed.

And that’s the crux of why those who support prison reform are watching this case so closely. In reform communities, the PLRA is viewed as a law that stifled prisoner rights. And this case, which has spanned decades and involved unprecedented scrutiny, is not seen as a beaming example of when court intervention is appropriate, it’s hard to envision any role for federal judicial intervention in prisons. Which would mean prison reforms would need to come from the hands of legislators–which historically, has been rare.

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  • John J. Pecchio

    Prisons are failing and rehabilitation has become just words to keep the taxpayers money flowing into these institutions, which have become so contaminated with flaws, embedded with unthinking and unknowing administrators and political bureaucrats. That’s why The Criminal Mind Never Sleeps!

    The Real World of Prison, Crime and Justice
    “A Story That Needs To Be Told”

    By Author – John J. Pecchio

    This article will inform the mind and startle the soul. You will read how crime and punishment in this country is out of control.
    My books “Hell Behind Prison Walls” and “The Devil’s Den of Prison and Justice” are true compelling and gripping stories taken from my personal thoughts and experiences of working in a prison system for almost three-decades.
    My Website http://www.johnpecchio.com is a good informational tool on prisons and justice. You can click on my miscellaneous icon that will take you into my books, newspaper articles and guestbook entries on what people say about my regional best-selling books, and our justice system.
    Do not overlook the audio video commercial to the rights of my Website that will show the type of criminals I worked with and how they act and look in today’s prisons…
    If you are interested in scheduling this author for a Book Signings, Personal Interviews and Prison Presentations, my e-mail address and phone numbers is also, available on my Website. http://www.johnpecchio.com
    When prisons were in command prisoners could look forward to being productive in life.
    But after several decades of prison bureaucrats experimenting with new reform methods they ended up taking a well run prison system and turned it into a Nightmare of Hell and a Playground for Criminal’s Rights.
    There is no prison reform methods left that will cure the lack of administrative and prisoner discipline, or stop how prisons have become so contaminated with flaws, imbedded with unthinking unknowing or corrupted officials and political bureaucrats?
    it send chills up and down your spine, when you are forced to move daily between freedom and captivity while walking a delicate line between administrative politics and the threat of inmate violence.
    The lockup system in these new high-tech all solitary confinement prisons, have turned most convicts into psychopathic monsters, acting like prehistoric man existing all over again…

    My prison career was coming to an end and I was looking forward to my retirement when what I always expected would happen did happen. One morning in my shop, without security present, I was brutally attacked by a serial killer serving two life terms for several senseless killings. He showed no remorse in society nor did he in prison. He should have received the death penalty, but lawmakers and prison officials choose to protect this criminal’s rights at taxpayers’ expense…
    Gang wars are taking over our society like butter melting over a hot stove. Approximately eighty-percent of thugs and gangsters control prison compounds and are career criminals, which come from the ghettos of our society.
    Eventually, the old gang members from the streets will be incarcerated for new crimes, and meet up with old gang members already imprisoned. Together they will bond once again, to continue dealing in contraband and committing more crimes in prisons.
    Taxpayers are living in hard times to support their families and keep their jobs. But this merry-go-round of political justice to protect criminal’s rights while they keep violated the rights of other is un-constitutional…
    In today’s society we have too many repeat-felons being released from prisons without being fully disciplined or rehabilitated. That is why repeat felons along with illegal-immigrants are committing most of the crimes in the United States.
    Lawmakers for years cannot locate approximately twelve-million illegal immigrants crossing the borders into this country. The new programs they are offering is to trick illegal immigrant out of hiding, by providing full amnesty, and give them entry permit into this country, along with healthcare benefits, at taxpayers’ expense. This is not going to help reduce the deficit and crime rates in this country.
    Federal Lawmakers recognize that prison spending is out of control. They keep pressuring the local government and prison officials, to set up a program that will reduce prison overcrowding and release thousands of criminals that have not completed their sentences or been fully reformed.
    For example, in California they have approximately 33-prisons that are filled with about 153-thousand criminals, and most of them are murderers, rapist, pedophiles, and drug-pushers and mentally unstable inmates living off the taxpayers.
    But why are lawmakers demanding that 55-thousand criminals from the California Correctional Facilities, be released within 3-years. When most of them are career criminals and will return back to prisons committing the same crimes?
    Taxpayers’ will be paying over $5,000 dollars a years to keep one-criminal on parole. Not to mention, the cost of law-enforcement officers putting their lives on the line again, chasing down the same felon(s) to be put back through our Judicial System at taxpayers’ expense.
    The present California Governor is now trying to make lawmakers reconsider their options of releasing prisoners because of the recidivism rate, which is more then seventy-nine percent returning in one to three-years.
    The three major problems that criminals have when incarcerated is to get revenge, continue dealing in contraband and demoralize and attack correctional officers because they remind them of the police officers on the streets.
    Prison Officials; know that repeat felons get more violent and evil-minded because they are surrounded, daily, by the same type of criminals they have become.
    You cannot reform criminals without re-socializing them first. And that’s why rehabilitation and prison reform have become just words to keep the taxpayer’s money flowing into these institutions.
    In Mexico, the crime rates are high, and that breeds a lot of corruption in their society, including law-enforcement officials. They now have the highest kidnapping rate in the world. When these Mexicans and millions of other illegal immigrants keep pouring over the boarders into our county, crime rates keep increasing. Phoenix Arizona now has the second highest kidnapping rate in the world.
    The federal panel of lawmakers within our government has created a stimulus package to help the American taxpayers that are out of work and many have to foreclose on their homes.
    The sad situation within our government, is how they are taking chances with taxpayers’ money to create stimulus packages, while supporting the highest deficit in the history of this country?
    How can our children and grandchildren that will be paying for all this, and continue to pay for government experiments and their political adventures without jobs?
    Prison spending is out of control. And the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
    When I hear how local governors, of each state, keeps on playing politics with the federal government in hopes they can reduce prison spending by reducing prison population, closing prisons, and reducing prison staff. This type of thinking is hypercritical and appalling to the security of prisons and society.
    Hello out there my fellow American, don’t walk to the employment office run, before some lawmakers pass a new law to allow illegal immigrants to collect unemployment…
    Prison officials cannot afford or keep releasing dangerous prisoners frivolously. Our criminal justice system was developed by lawmakers to pass laws to put these criminals behind bars and keep society safe.
    You can now read how federal and state prisons have deteriorated to their worst condition in the history of these institutions. They have changed from being run with dignity and strong security into a hellish nightmare where corruption is the norm.
    With the loss of positive leadership in our prisons came the increase of prisoner’s power, primarily caused by their ability to hide behind highly-defended “Civil Rights”, which has now taken precedence above all else. These rights allowed them to live without fear of strong retribution for their actions, thereby leading to a breakdown in inmate behavior and resulting in riots, fights, and physical and verbal abuse of prison workers.

    Sincerely

    John J. Pecchio, Author

  • Mailo24

    They are criminals it is prison that is what they get.

  • Kgilroy

    My husband is serving 19 years for burglary and receiving stolen property. I agree that he broke the law and should be punished. But 19 years! Can you have some compassion? He never hurt anyone or came in contact with anyone. The sentencing laws are too harsh. That is why the prison system is overcrowded.

  • Pray4Peace

    Follow the money! The big business of prison guard unions, for-profit corporation prisons, bail bond policies that result in more and longer incarcerations, tough-on-crime policies that require more expensive employees within criminal justice and incarceration systems are among the cost that are bankrupting California.

    We would be better off spending our tax dollars on education, infrastructure, and programs that are actually needed and provide pay back

    Donovan prison in San Diego credited their rehab, drug, and education programs with reducing their recidivism rate from 70% to 21%. Rehab programs cost far less than the $42,000 incarceration cost each year for each inmate. More important, they helped prevent new crime and new victims.

    Profit motive, false economy, and faulty logic caused deep cuts in funding for the programs. Warehousing people in horrific conditions for economic profit waste salvageable lives, creates a cycle of prison for families, does not keep us safer, and waste our tax dollars.

  • Anonymous

    I know an inmate who has not had even MINIMAL health care in many, many years inside the prisons. It is time to help these people locked behind bars and stop treating them like caged animals.
    The CDCR releases 10,000 a month, so why is 40,000 over two years so scary? It’s a simple problem of those of on the outside, yes US, who are being rounded up and put back into the prisons for minor parole violations. There’s money, paybacks, all kinds of incentives to keep those prisons filled…. if you’re part of the prison industry.

  • Riverak1

    This is what happens when you don’t think about the future. laws in California were made to put people in prison like the three strikes law. well know all the people who voted for that stupid law do not want to pay for the bill that it has made. holding prisoners is not cheap so if you want to keep locking up people then you need to make space for them, yes they are criminals but they are also human!

  • nora weber

    What they are missing is the fact that 10,000 inmates per month are released in Calif now, releasing 40,000 over two years into a population of 38 million is minor. Also, these are non violent inmates. We have about 84,000 prisoners in on minor technical parole violations who shouldn’t be in prison in the first place. And those who will be released, were getting out anyway.

    It took 10 months of writing letters to prison doctors to get my diabetic son’s toenails cut in Corcoran State Prison . Now he faces losing his feet as a result of a bacteria infection that was caused by the medical staff not changing the bandages regularly as they should have.
    He is there because of a motorcycle wreck, and very harsh sentencing.

  • Richmck

    In dealing with prisons, we have gone through the looking glass! Based on national standards, and the Legislative Analyst, California has a prison capacity of 156,503 beds. On November 17 the Department of Corrections (DC&R) reported an in-state population of 154,024 inmates, a 2,479 prison bed surplus.

    The politicians and DC&R failed to report that almost 50,000 expensive prison beds are occupied by technical parole violators and “wobblers”. They are serving sentences of less than four months in prison only because of the 65,000 county jail bed shortages. The politicians and DC&R also fail to mention that California has less than 3% of its inmates in contract facilities, compared to 13% in Texas and 17% in the federal prison system. Contract beds cost about $22,500 less than a prison bed.

    But wouldn’t it be preferable to have more contract beds (and the jobs) in California? If California had 50,000 contract beds, the State would save about $1.1 billion in annual prison costs and $6 billion for prison construction cost. Taxpayers need to consult with Alice.

  • Pray4Peace

    The phrase “contract beds” is a nice sounding name for the big business of for-profit corporation prisons. Sending inmates to for-profit corporate prisons because of overcrowding does not fix the problem. It just kicks it down the road and is not economically sustainable.

    Talk about the fox guarding the hen house! For-profit prisons make more money by NOT rehabilitating inmates or treating them humanly. That results longer expensive incarceration time and inmates being more likely to return to prison after they are released. That may be the goal of the for-profit contract-bed corporate prisons, but it waste salvageable lives and our tax dollars.

    There are some functions such as waging wars, ensuring free and fair elections, and managing criminal justice and incarceration that should not be hired out to private corporations. For-profit, contract-bed, corporate prisons have no place in a democracy.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve got two points. Number one, I’m pretty sure the majority of Californians/Americans trust that if someone is locked up it’s because they should be. I did too, before my husband was arrested for defending us against 5 attackers. We’ve been prisoners for 5 years now – he on the inside, and me on the outside – and during this time have come across way, way too many cases such as ours, of families devestated by laws that are supposedly tough on crime… but are proven to be means of perpetual torment… which brings me to my second point – that once inside prisoners and their families are no longer considered worthy of care or consideration of any kind – or attention as we are ignored all the way to Sacramento. But rather more like experiments on how far a human can be neglected and demeaned before they will go crazy, go violent, or conform into a good little nobody. It’s true torture, happening right under our noses. So because of my newly aquired insight into the “types” inside California’s prisons, I see no threat to an early release of a fraction of them over a 2 year period. Prisoners are being released daily already because their time is up – something like 10,000 per month. Early release propaganda is only a fear tactic.

  • Gina Burns

    The United States of America houses more prisoners than any other country in the world. Why? Profit, We the Corporations verses We the people In California not only the Department of Corruptions needs an overhaul, but the whole Judicial system needs to be changed, that’s why the massive 180% overcrowded inhumane conditions are the way they are in all 33 prisons in California along with the rest of the United State. The public can’t continue to be fooled by all the hype the CCPOA along with the Governor of CA when lying the prisons have improved, People are still dying and will continue to die. When will the media be allowed behind the Prison walls to shed light on the truth?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXOHtlvO9jI

  • Sanders

    I have done 16 years of this life in prison behind the strike law and I have no violence. That’s not my nature. I can honestly tell you that you tax payers are being raped by this system. You will continue to be raped until CDCR changes the way it deals with human beings first. But, their disreguard and complacence has allowed the deterioration of even the slightest hope of encouraging the change that can take place in human beings. Plus, there’s alot of money to be made when you encourage and allow gangs, rape, drugs, segregation by races, encourage, even turn a blind eye to violence amoung inmates in both men and womens prisons. Why? Job security. If there were no “bad” problems, there would be no need for the level of security you say you need. It’s been a long, lonely road, and even unbelievable. Unbelievable because I was housed with a herion addict who everyday went to the yard and got her fix. Drugs being done all around me and C.O’s knowing and who wants to spend their shift doing paperwork. Guess what, who’s witnessing all this craziness. Non-violent inmates. And guess what the non-violent inmate can do about it. Nothing. Just hope and pray they aren’t victimized and or abused before their release. And guess who they can’t trust to come to? The C.O’s. Have we got time to focus on our rehabilitation in this caotic enviornment. Not much. Yes, its overcrowded and programs are nil, vocations and education cut and yes alot of lockdown. And when there’s a lockdown the C.O’s love it. They get paid alot of money for watching their movies they bring in. If there’s a fight they just pretend they don’t hear and we all get to watch and pray it will never be us. I carry alot and I
    pray its over. But I do feel that this release is inevitable and I also feel that CDCR is capable of releasing only non-violent inmates with no mistakes. If they do release a violent inmate, believe me, it won’t be a mistake. It will be to feed the paranoia they put in the public minds so they will continue to have a wonderful job. There’s more I could say and maybe I will later, but right now my grandson needs access to internet…Oh and to the man who was beat down by the violent inmate, what were you doing alone without security with an inmate like that. Yes, I’m sorry it happened to you. Yet these kind of inmates will not be released. Peace….Sanders

  • guadalupe

    my man was sentenced to 28 yrs in prison for carjacking! he was threatend and blamed for a crime he didn’t comitte. he has been in prison for 15 years december 2010

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WAOD24HTZQLTPI4ZZ7WO6N5KCI PaulF

    The laws and the judge’s are not even sopping to relize the problem as they sentenced my son who was on parole for possesing a bullet,no gunn no gang ties just asimple bullet he picked up,he also has no violence on his record this just hjappened in febuary 2011

  • Medell Frost

    Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they
    violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the
    Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison
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