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After Oakland Police Deaths: Fixing Parole

By Jonathan Simor

California's state correctional system, its prisons and parole system, have been on a path toward demographic crisis for years, with massively overcrowded and dysfunctionally designed prisons, and a parole system that regularly sent most of them back to prison after initial release for indiscriminate reasons. So long as the state's long economic boom continued (or wasn't interrupted for too long), this structural threat to the state's fiscal and public health remained under the radar for most Californians; no longer. First came the mega prison lawsuits known as Plata v. Schwarzenegger and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger and the special three judge panel that in a recent preliminary ruling suggested that systemic failures to deliver basic medical care and mental health treatment as required by the Constitution can only be remedied through a significant reduction in California's prison population and signaled that they are ready to order such a reduction soon...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on March 25, 2009 (boomark / email).