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Practitioner's Notes: California to Integrate Prisons (At Last)

By Douglas A. Berman

As recent news articles have described, here and here, the State of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has finally taken tentative steps toward integrating its prisons.  For many years, California had been one of the only states to acknowledge using race to segregate prisoners.  Under former CDCR regulations, prisoners were separated by race in double cells for up to 60 days each time they entered a new correctional facility, on the rationale that the policy prevented violence caused by racial gangs.  The Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional in Johnson v. California, 543 U.S. 499 (2005).  (Proskauer Rose represented the petitioner, an African-American inmate, before the Supreme Court...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on August 08, 2008 (boomark / email).