Prison Break

From David Dayen at Calitics, news that California has lost a federal ruling and now must reduce overcrowded prisons by 44,000.

A ruling by the three-judge panel who have effectively taken control of the California prison system has ordered the state to reduce the prison population by as much as 40,000 44,000 inmates within the next two years, finding the system in violation of Constitutional mandates. The Tough On Crime balloon has just popped.

The judges said that reducing prison crowding in California was the only way to change what they called an unconstitutional prison health care system that causes one unnecessary death a week. In a scathing 184-page order, the judges criticized state officials, saying they had failed to comply with previous orders to fix the health care system in the prisons and reduce crowding, and recommended remedies, including reform of the parole system.

The special three-judge panel also described a chaotic prison system where prisoners were stacked in triple bunk beds in gymnasiums, hallways and day rooms; where single guards were often forced to monitor scores of inmates at a time; and where ill inmates died for lack of treatment.

"In these overcrowded conditions, inmate-on-inmate violence is almost impossible to prevent, infectious diseases spread more easily, and lockdowns are sometimes the only means by which to maintain control," the panel wrote. "In short, California's prisons are bursting at the seams and are impossible to manage."

This started as a series of lawsuits claiming that the overcrowded prisons violated inmates' Constitutional right to medical care through the 8th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment while under confinement. The judges concluded that massive reductions were the only way to get the balance right and restore Constitutional order to the process.

It's nothing less than an epic failure at all levels of leadership over the last thirty years which has brought us to the point where judges must mandate reductions in the prisons. A state that is unable to manage its finances can also clearly not manage its plainly illegal corrections system.

So now, California has to let prisoners go. They have no choice now.

The real irony is that California Republicans tried to pin the "early release of 27,000 prisoners" on the Democrats as part of the budget deal to try to make it look like the Dems were soft on crime. Now the Republicans have nobody to blame but California's Republican-born three strikes rule. They wanted to lock up as many people as possible, they just didn't want to pay for prisons, guards, and prisoners. Now it has blown up in their faces.

Yggy has more:

And if you’re facing a court order to reduce your incarceration head count, the sensible thing to do is to start letting older prisoners out. Some of them will probably offend again, but the majority will have “aged out” of serious criminal activity. And older criminals tend to engage in less-risky, less-violent crime that’s not as bad.

But thanks to “three strikes” California mostly can’t do this. Instead of letting out some of the vast number of mostly harmless offenders they have behind bars, they’re going to need to keep them locked up and instead cut loose people with fewer crimes on their record. This is going to be a younger and much more dangerous group and letting them out will lead to higher crime. And that, in turn, will increase demand on the state’s punitive apparatus but it’s not going to magically conjure up any new prison beds and lots of the ones they have will continue to be occupied by oldsters who don’t need to be behind bars.

California's prison experiment has collapsed. The results over the next couple of years will not be pretty...and remember, these prisoners will have to be released into the worst state economy in the country that is planning to make unholy amounts of draconian cuts to state services, exactly the kinds of services these prisoners would need in order to integrate back into society successfully.

It's going to be a nightmare.