Published: February 13, 2009
A three-judge panel has tentatively ordered California to reduce the population of its desperately overcrowded prisons by as much as one-third, or as many as 55,000 prisoners, over the next three years. The ruling was an extreme step — but a necessary one. Like many states, California is putting too many people behind bars for too long, and it doesn’t have the money to build more facilities.
Instead of appealing, as it has vowed to do, California should get to work overhauling its misguided incarceration policies.
California’s 33 prisons were designed to house 84,000 inmates; they now hold more than 150,000. In some cases, prisoners are being triple-bunked in gymnasiums and other places not intended to be used for housing. There are not enough medical facilities or enough personnel to ensure that prisoners get the mental health and medical treatment they need.
The court found that California was violating the prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights — which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment — and it ordered the state to reduce the inmate population to levels closer to the system’s intended capacity. The court concluded that this could be done through a variety of means without endangering public safety.
A large number of California prisoners are behind bars for technical parole violations. Others are in for minor, nonviolent crimes. Inmates like those can and should be released, and given help to reintegrate into society. The state’s limited prison space should be used for people who truly need to be there. It is not ideal when a court has to intervene so directly in managing prisons. But California has been unwilling, on its own, to run a prison system that complies with the Constitution.
There are now 2.3 million people behind bars nationwide — many for nonviolent crimes. And many state prisons are badly overcrowded. Incarcerating people who do not need to be is not only illegal and inhumane, it is a bad crime-fighting strategy. For many inmates, particularly young people in for minor offenses, prison becomes a training ground for a life of crime, rather than a deterrent.
It also is enormously expensive. In a newly released report, The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization for criminal justice reform, notes that many states have begun to enact more enlightened prison policies in large part for budgetary reasons.
This country needs to be a lot smarter about who it puts in prison in the first place, and who would be better off in drug-treatment programs and other nonprison environments. It has to do a better job of educating prisoners and giving them jobs skills. And it needs to devote more energy and money to prisoner re-entry, the critical moment when prisoners are released and need help getting jobs, housing and onto the right path.
The recent California ruling should not be seen as a mass distribution of get-out-of-jail-free cards. The court was rightly insisting that the state provide every prisoner it holds with constitutionally acceptable living conditions. It also was prodding California to come up with smarter, more cost-effective and more humane imprisonment policies — something state officials should have done on their own a long time ago.
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