Governor Brown Wants to End Court-Ordered Limit on Inmates Housed in State Prisons

Governor Jerry Brown recently announced it was time to end a federal court-ordered cap on the number of inmates in state corrections facilities and “restore California’s rightful control of its prison system.”

The Governor’s announcement comes after the State’s filing to a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in which officials argued that the State had fixed the medical and mental health system in state prisons, making “unnecessary” the federal court’s order to reduce the state prison capacity.

The federal court had ordered corrections officials to submit a plan outlining how the State would reduce the number of inmates from the current rate of 150% to 137.5% of the so-called “design capacity” by June 2013.  State officials complied with the order “under protest” and identified several available options to reduce inmate populations but deemed all of them poor.  Some of those potential changes included altering sentencing to shift prisoners from state prison to county jails, accepting more prisoners into alternative programs and releasing convicted felons.

These options Gov. Brown said “would threaten public safety and interfere with California’s independent right to determine its own criminal justice laws.”

With two years to meet the court-ordered rate, State officials passed a strategy that shifted responsibility of certain offenders from state prisons to county jails. The plan helped reduced the state prison population by more than 24,000 prisoners.  However, with less than six months until the June deadline California is still a projected 9,000 prisoners short of meeting the ordered capacity limit.

Nevertheless, State officials see this as a major progress. In a statement Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Jeff Beard claimed that California’s “prison health care system is now a model for the nation” and that further inmate reductions are “unnecessary and unsafe.”

Not everyone agrees with the State’s claim that the prison healthcare system is adequate.  Rebekah Evenson from Prison Law Office, which represents the prisoners, said inmates’ medical and mental health care is “vastly inadequate” and that “prisoners are continuing to die and commit suicide as a result of the inadequate care.”

Allen Hopper, criminal justice and drug policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said, “ the State’s claim reflects a stubborn insistence of the Brown administration of refusing to go any further than realignment in terms of criminal justice reforms that can reduce the prison population,” adding that the state could enact “common sense reforms,” such as changing sentencing for low-level drug offenders, which could reduce the prison population without risking public safety.

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