June 7, 2011 | 1:36 PM | By

California releases its prison overcrowding plan

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

CDCR

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation filed its formal plan with the Federal District Court in the Northern District of California today for how it will reduce the state’s prison population by about 33,500 inmates over the next two years. Among the take-aways from the filing, two main points echoed a few times: first, CDCR says it will not be releasing inmates early, contrary to popular wisdom; and second, the system has already come some way towards reaching the final goal. Specifically, the state has a number of ideas of how they’ll get to the eventual goal of 137.5 percent of designed prison capacity:

  • Realignment: Governor Jerry Brown’s much talked about plan to transfer a number of inmates to local jails, cut down on parole, and shrink the Division of Juvenile Justice could, if funded, get California to court-ordered prison population levels.
  • Parole reforms: First, Brown’s realignment plan would implement changes that would drastically reduce the number of parolees returning to prison through the expeditious parole revocation process. Most parole violators would not serve prison time (they’d go to jail instead) and the decision to revoke would have to be made by a local court instead of a state parole officer and the Board of Parole Hearings. The implementation of non-revocable parole (where a parolee is still subject to searches and drug tests, but cannot have their parole revoked without a new criminal conviction) should also reduce the prison population, the state says.
  • Prison prevention: A move designed to encourage counties to not send masses of people to prison, another recent reform gives county probation departments money to reduce the number of probation violators going to prison–numbers the counties can keep down by committing money to rehabilitation and/or handling those who commit borderline crimes locally.
  • Building more prisons: AB 900, passed in 2007, authorized the state to spend about $7.7 billion (money from various sources) on updating prison facilities and constructing new ones. Progress on getting these projects off the ground has been slow. California broke ground on its first AB 900 facility about one year ago. More projects are being worked on and planned, the court filing states, which could increase California’s capacity for housing inmates.

Notably, Brown’s plan does not involve sending more prisoners to out-of-state private facilities. About 10,000 inmates are currently serving time in contract beds in other states, a policy that began under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and which angered the correctional officers’ union and prisoner rights advocates. Brown’s plan actually calls for eventually bringing those inmates back to California “as in-state capacity increases.” The plan also makes no mention of in-state contract beds in locally owned and privately owned Community Correctional Facilities, which according to the Bakersfield Californian, have space for low-level offenders, but have been closing down as of late.