Prison Overcrowding: California's Got Some 8th Amendment Trouble, While Other States Look to Cut Costs
Prison overcrowding has come to the fore recently as economically stressed state governments wonder if reducing incarcerated populations, particularly by releasing non-violent and low-risk offenders, may be a way to save money. Well, in California there’s another reason to thin out the prison roles. From the Washington Post‘s Robert Barnes:
A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Monday upheld a judicial order that could result in the release of nearly 40,000 prisoners from a California penal system so overcrowded that its conditions are, the court wrote, “incompatible with the concept of human dignity.”
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The number of prisoners in California continues to fluctuate, but at one time the prison system there held nearly twice as many inmates as the 80,000 it was meant to hold. When a special three-judge panel first ordered the release, it said that about 46,000 inmates would need to be freed in order to reduce the prison population to a manageable 110,000.
Since then, Kennedy said, 9,000 inmates have been released. An attorney for the inmates said after the ruling that 32,000 inmates should be released.
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“As many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium, monitored by as few as two or three correctional officers,” [Kennedy] wrote. “As many as 54 prisoners may share a single toilet.” Suicides averaged one a week, he said; a report that found one inmate died about every week from ailments that could have been prevented.
Kennedy said the conditions are not safe for the prisoners or correctional officers, and he even included photos of the overcrowding as part of his opinion.
Kennedy said reducing the prison population could be accomplished in a number of ways besides simply releasing inmates. Some could be transferred to local jails or to prisons outside the state, something California already is doing. Expanding the use of “good-time” credits would allow the release of those least likely to reoffend; so would excusing prisoners now incarcerated for technical violations of parole.
Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas strongly dissented, with Justice Scalia reading his dissent, in which Thomas joined, from the bench.
While this case has its origins elsewhere, the PSLawNet Blog is interested to see how much continued discussion there will be about the extraordinarily high costs of administering prison programs in the recession’s wake. Aside from the Reuters piece we linked to above, in April the NAACP, joined by a bizarre collection of folks from all across the political spectrum – when’s the last time the NAACP and Grover Norquist joined forces? – released a report detailing how much spending goes to maintaining prisons.
