Legal News

Prisons ordered to scale back inmate populations for health and safety reasons

By Richard Binder

In the first such ruling of its kind, a special three-judge panel has held tentatively that overcrowding in California prisons presents an unconstitutional risk to inmate health and safety and that the prisoner population must be reduced by tens of thousands of inmates.

California has been operating its 33 prisons at nearly 200% capacity, with 156,000 inmates in prisons designed to hold fewer than 100,000, and 6,000 others in privately run prisons out of state, and 11,000 living in conservation camps or private prisons inside the state.

The panel has previously found that the prison system's mental health and medical care is so negligent that it is a direct cause of inmate deaths and suicides. The ruling calls for additional briefing and a hearing to consider a process for handling a reduction but lays out a tentative goal of lowering inmate numbers to 125% to 145% of capacity.

The judges issued the decision after a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons. Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it had lost the trial and would have to make dramatic changes in its prisons unless it could reach a settlement with inmates' lawyers. State officials immediately said they would appeal.

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).