Constitutional Law

'Tough-on-Crime' Laws Blamed For Calif.'s Prison System Debacle

A federal court in California is preparing to order the state to start cutting its prison population to ensure that inmates are not deprived of adequate healthcare. A three-judge panel recently ruled that California was likely to lose long-running legal cases involving inmates’ challenges to their treatment. The Los Angeles Times reported that if the federal court order is finalized, California would need to cut its prison population by more than 50,000. Federal courts have already ruled that the state prison system is violating the constitutional rights of inmates by not providing them proper healthcare.

The three-judge panel noted that the state’s 33 prisons, designed for 84,000 prisoners, now imprisons 158,000, resulting in dangerously packed prisons. “There is … uncontroverted evidence that, because of overcrowding, there are not enough clinical facilities or resources to accommodate inmates with medical or mental health needs at the level they require.” In an analysis of the federal court’s ruling, The New York Times cited critics of the state’s prison system who blamed “tough-on-crime laws coupled with a failure to finance prison programs” for the overcrowding. The Times also noted that California is the only state that paroles 98 percent of released inmates and that about 700,000 paroled inmates wind up back in prison every year. John Petersillia, with the RAND Corporation, told the newspaper that the parole policy was largely to blame for overcrowding.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown told the Los Angeles Times that the latest federal court ruling would be appealed, calling it a “blunt instrument that does not recognize the imperatives of public safety, nor the challenges of incarcerating criminals.”  

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 11, 2009 (boomark / email).