Time is running out for California Governor Jerry Brown to get real about mass incarceration. He has two weeks left to produce a plan to meet the prison population cap by the end of 2013.
Less than two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found that California prisons were so overcrowded and prisoners so underserved that conditions actually constituted cruel and unusual punishment. An order was issued to decrease the prison population to 137.5% capacity—still significantly more than the prisons were designed to hold. A systematic decrease in the prison population was in effect until this year. Then Jerry Brown decided that the prison emergency was “over” and filed an appeal to end court supervision.
Yet California prisons are at 149.5% capacity and still have not complied with health care standards. That’s good enough for Brown, who apparently sees no problem with prisons that have become “de-facto asylums.”
Unfortunately for him, the court is doing its job. It rejected Brown’s appeal last week and threatened to hold him in contempt if within three weeks he does not present a proposal for reaching the population cap by the end of the year. He now has two weeks left.
Brown has said, "We certainly will appeal whatever we can appeal…but at the same time, with the court threatening contempt at every level, when the Supreme Court gives these three judges the green light, then we have to do what they tell us, and we'll have a list of 9,000 or 10,000 of our finer inmates that will be ready for neighborhood visitations throughout California." He clearly misses the point.
This isn’t about a random mass-release of inmates; it’s about fixing a broken system. It’s about humane conditions for fellow human beings. California has had notoriously terrible prison conditions for more than 20 years – it’s time for change.
Not that California is the only culprit. On the other side of the country, civil rights attorneys from the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, which advocates for poor inmates, are engaging in a legal battle of their own by suing the city of Philadelphia for its overcrowded prison conditions. The city’s prisons were built to hold 6,500 people but currently hold 8,897.
Clearly it’s time for somebody to lead the way on doing this right.
