A panel of federal judges issued a scathing final report on overcrowding in California prisons and have ordered the state to reduce its inmate population by 40,000, or some 27% within two years. The judges determined
“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. In short, California’s prisons are bursting at the seams and are impossible to manage.”
The panel proposed reducing the prison population via "expansion of earned credits, the diversion of technical parole violators, the diversion of low-risk offenders to community corrections, and the expansion of evidence-based programming".
California's prison system has been under federal receivership as a result of a ruling that the overcrowded state prisons had resulted in 34 prisoner deaths and violated inmates Constitutional guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment.
The prison population, growing at an unsustainable rate since the early 1990's, come largely as a result of mandatory sentencing guidelines from the federal government, a shift to inflexible indeterminate sentencing, and some ridiculously rigid drug laws. The state also passed a series of three strikes referendums which further exacerbated overcrowding, and along with the influence of a politically powerful prison guards union, the state now finds itself with a prison population twice the states prison capacity.
Recently the state legislature just passed a budget that they claim will stem a $26B shortfall. Draconian cuts to public education, health care and social welfare programs became the order of the day and there is certainly no money in what's left of the budget to build additional prisons to keep the those surplus 40,000 inmates.
The state was given 45 days to prepare a plan on the inmate reduction.
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