Thread: California won't free criminals to ease prison crowding

May 24, 2011

California won't free criminals to ease prison crowding

09:00 AM
By John Bacon, USA TODAY

California prison officials say they hope to remove tens of thousands of inmates from prison rolls in the next two years without setting any criminals free, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Matthew Cate, secretary of California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said plans to shift low-level offenders to county jails and other facilities would ease the persistent crowding in state prisons that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday causes "needless suffering and death" and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

The state has estimated that more than 30,000 inmates must be removed from the state prison system to comply with the court mandate. The state now has 143,335 inmates, Cate says.

STORY: Details on the Supreme Court ruling

Gov. Jerry Brown's transfer plan "would solve quite a bit" of the overcrowding problem, Cate told the Times. "Our goal is to not release inmates at all.''

The hitch: Brown's plan would involve hundreds of millions of dollars in tax hikes that could be a hard sell to state lawmakers.

"Citizens will pay a real price as crime victims, as thousands of convicted felons will be on the streets with minimal supervision," Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said in a statement. "Many of these 'early release' prisoners will commit crimes which would never have occurred had they remained in custody."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... crowding/1

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-court-prisons-20110524,0,2973297.story

latimes.com

U.S. Supreme Court orders massive inmate release to relieve California's crowded prisons

Justice Kennedy cites inhumane conditions, while dissenters fear a crime rampage. Gov. Jerry Brown seeks tax hike to fund transfers to county jails as prison officials hope to avoid freeing anyone.

By David G. Savage and Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2011

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California must remove tens of thousands of inmates from its prison rolls in the next two years, and state officials vowed to comply, saying they hoped to do so without setting any criminals free.

Administration officials expressed confidence that their plan to shift low-level offenders to county jails and other facilities, already approved by lawmakers, would ease the persistent crowding that the high court said Monday had caused "needless suffering and death" and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Gov. Jerry Brown's transfer plan "would solve quite a bit" of the overcrowding problem, though not as quickly as the court wants, said Matthew Cate, secretary of California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. "Our goal is to not release inmates at all.''

But the governor's plan would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, to be paid for with tax hikes that could prove politically impossible to implement. And at present, Brown's plan is the only one on the table.

The governor issued a muted statement calling for enactment of his program and promising, "I will take all steps necessary to protect public safety."

The court gave the state two years to shrink the number of prisoners by more than 33,000 and two weeks to submit a schedule for achieving that goal. The state now has 143,335 inmates, according to Cate.

Monday's 5-4 ruling, upholding one of the largest such orders in the nation's history, came with vivid descriptions of indecent care from the majority and outraged warnings of a "grim roster of victims" from some in the minority.

In presenting the decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Sacramento native, spoke from the bench about suicidal prisoners being held in "telephone booth-sized cages without toilets" and others, sick with cancer or in severe pain, who died before being seen by a doctor. As many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium, and as many as 54 may share a single toilet, he said.

Kennedy, whose opinion was joined by his four liberal colleagues, said the state's prisons were built to hold 80,000 inmates, but were crowded with as many 156,000 a few years ago.

He cited a former Texas prison director who toured California lockups and described the conditions as "appalling," "inhumane" and unlike any he had seen "in more than 35 years of prison work."

The court's four conservatives accused their colleagues of "gambling with the safety of the people of California," in the words of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. "I fear that today's decision will lead to a grim roster of victims. I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see," he said.

Justice Antonin Scalia, delivering his own dissent in the courtroom, said the majority had affirmed "what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history." He added, "terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order." Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Law enforcement officials in California concurred and said that trying to squeeze more inmates into already overcrowded county systems would force some early releases.

"Citizens will pay a real price as crime victims, as thousands of convicted felons will be on the streets with minimal supervision," Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said in a statement. "Many of these 'early release' prisoners will commit crimes which would never have occurred had they remained in custody."

"It's an undue burden …to deal with the state's problems,'' said Jerry Gutierrez, chief deputy of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Republican lawmakers said they would continue to fight the governor's plan and its reliance on tax increases. Democrats "are looking for any excuse they can to try to have more taxes," said the leader of the state Senate's GOP minority, Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga.

Dutton said state officials should instead fast-track construction of new prisons and pressure the federal government to take custody of thousands of illegal immigrant felons housed in the state system.

Administration officials said their plan would keep the public safe by moving offenders into county lockups, drug treatment programs and other types of criminal supervision. But Cate said the Brown administration "cannot act alone" and conceded that release of some prisoners remains a possibility.

He urged the Legislature to immediately fund Brown's $302-million plan, which would shift 32,500 inmates to county jurisdiction by mid-2013. Among those identified for the program are tens of thousands of parole violators sent to costly state prisons every year to serve 90 days or less.

Monday's ruling arose from a pair of prison class-action lawsuits, one going back 20 years, which accused the state of failing to provide decent care for prisoners who were mentally ill or in need of medical care. The two suits were combined by a panel of three judges, all of whom were veterans with a liberal reputation.

U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson from San Francisco and Lawrence Karlton from Sacramento were joined by 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt from Los Angeles. Since overcrowding was the "primary cause" of the substandard care meted out to inmates, they ordered the state to reduce its prison population by 38,000 to 46,000 persons.

Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and then-Atty. Gen. Brown appealed, believing a more conservative Supreme Court would be wary of telling a state how to run its prisons.

Since the earlier court order, the state has transferred about 9,000 state inmates to county jails. According to recent figures, the total prison population is about 33,000 more than the limit of 110,000 set by the three-judge panel. Kennedy said state officials can decide how to reduce the number of inmates.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the court "has done the right thing" by addressing the "egregious and extreme overcrowding in California's prisons."

Donald Specter, the lawyer for the nonprofit Prison Law Office who represented the inmates, said "this landmark decision will not only help prevent prisoners from dying of malpractice and neglect, but it will make the prisons safer for the staff, improve public safety and save the taxpayers billions of dollars."

Others agreed with the dissenters. "What is the message for law-abiding people in California? Buy a gun. Get a dog. Put in an alarm system. Even seriously consider bars on the windows," said Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, writing on his "Crime & Consequences" blog.

Meanwhile, the court took no action Monday on another California case, a challenge to the state's policy of granting in-state tuition at its colleges and universities to students who are illegal immigrants and have graduated from its high schools.

The justices said they would consider the appeal in a later private conference.

david.savage@latimes.com

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... rint.story

Supreme Court stands firm on prison crowding

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
Updated 2h 42m ago |

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court declared California prison overcrowding unconstitutional and upheld an order by a 5-4 vote that could force the transfer or release of more than 30,000 convicted felons over the next two years.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials insisted Monday that a new state law, allowing some offenders to serve sentences under local county supervision, could significantly cut the need to release inmates.

"It's our hope that, overall, we will see a pretty significant reduction in the prison population due to" the new law, said Matthew Cate, secretary of the corrections department. Cate and other officials in a teleconference with reporters deflected questions about convicts who could be freed because of the ruling.

State legislators are still considering how to finance the shift to local incarceration. On Monday, it was unclear how quickly the court's decision might impact prisoners and public safety in California. Under a lower court's order, officials have two years to reduce the inmate population.

Prisoners' advocates said the high court's decision should force the state to reconsider harsh sentences that filled its prisons beyond capacity. "The massive prison buildup in California in recent decades is the result of overly punitive policies such as 'three strikes and you're out' along with ineffective parole revocation polices," Marc Mauer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project said in a statement.

In the ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by the court's four liberals, declared that inmates' medical care and mental health had been severely compromised. Their decision upheld an order from a special three-judge panel in lawsuits brought on behalf of inmates who alleged prison conditions amounted to a violation of the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In a decision that affects only California, Kennedy, often a swing vote, emphasized that the state's prison ills had been well-documented and that officials had faced court orders to fix the problems for more than 10 years.

"For years the medical and mental health care provided by California's prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners' basic health needs," Kennedy said, noting that as many as 200 prisoners had lived in a gym and as many as 54 prisoners had shared a single toilet.

The four more conservative justices dissented. Justice Antonin Scalia took the rare step of reading portions of his statement from the bench. He described the lower court's order requiring release of tens of thousands of felons as "perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history. Scalia said the order allowed judges to go "wildly beyond their institutional capacity."

He and the other dissenters predicted the decision would affect public safety in California. Scalia said "terrible things (were) sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order."

In earlier decades, federal courts were more involved in helping correct societal problems and ensure civil rights, whether in prison overcrowding, school segregation or environmental concerns. That era faded in part because the increasingly conservative high court believed judges were treading on the domain of legislators.

Monday's case, Kennedy stressed, grew out of especially dire conditions. He noted that the prison population at one point was 156,000, nearly double the number that buildings were designed to hold. The special panel that heard the prisoners' challenge ordered the state to reduce prison population to 137.5% of design capacity.

The current population is 143,435, prison officials said, and under the judges' order it would have to get down to about 109,805 in two years.

Lawsuits at the heart of Monday's case were filed in 1990 and 2001. Among the claims from prisoners' lawyers were that "mentally ill prisoners have been found hanged to death in holding tanks where observation windows are obscured with smeared feces, and discovered catatonic in pools of their own urine after spending nights in locked cages."

Kennedy appended pictures to his opinion, including of "dry cages" used for inmates awaiting beds in a mental health unit.

"As a consequence of their own actions, prisoners may be deprived of rights that are fundamental to liberty," Kennedy said. "Yet the law and the Constitution demand recognition of certain other rights." Kennedy noted that most of the prisoners who would be released would not be the ones with medical problems, rather those who would be eligible for good-time credits and early parole.

Kennedy was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy said the lower court would have to continue to monitor the situation. He said that the state may be able to show that progress in lowering the population makes the overall situation "less urgent."

California officials had urged the high court to reverse the order, saying violations of prisoner rights could be addressed through new construction, some prisoner transfers out of state and the hiring of more medical personnel. The three-judge panel said earlier such vows had failed to sufficiently improve the system.

Scalia's dissent in Brown v. Plata was signed by Justice Clarence Thomas. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel A`lito dissented separately. Alito, joined by Roberts, said the lower court's decree violates federal law.

"The Constitution does not give federal judges the authority to run state penal systems," Alito wrote. "Decisions regarding state prisons have profound public safety and financial implications, and states are generally free to make these decisions as they choose."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington ... sons_n.htm

How many of these vicious criminals are going to be released in the neighborhood where Justice Kennedy's lives? None. Maybe some day he'll meet up with some of them? Well, it's just a thought.

RELATED

Medical Parole Denied For Quadriplegic Rapist

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-238779.html

Published: May 26, 2011
Updated: 7:40 a.m.

No parole for trouble-making double murderer

By DOUG IRVING
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A suspected gang member convicted of murdering two rivals during a fight in Santa Ana will spend at least seven more years in prison after a parole board rejected his bid for release Wednesday.

Ray Anthony Pina, now 49 and formerly of Los Angeles, is being held at Mule Creek State Prison outside Sacramento. While in prison, he has been punished for several major violations of prison rules, including fighting and making threats, according to prosecutors.

The Board of Parole Hearings on Wednesday turned down Pina's first bid for parole after more than 20 years in state prison. He will not be eligible for parole again until 2018, according to prosecutors.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office says Pina continues to pose a "serious threat" to public safety. It sent a deputy district attorney to Pina's parole hearing to speak against releasing him.

Pina and other members of a Los Angeles gang were cruising in Santa Ana in September 1984 when they confronted members of a Santa Ana gang, according to testimony from his trial.

Both sides identified themselves, which led to a car chase that ended when the Santa Ana gang members forced Pina's car to the curb, according to testimony. One of the Santa Ana gang members got out of his car and hit one of Pina's friends through a window, prosecutors say.

Pina grabbed a gun and got out of the car, ignoring his friends who tried to stop him, according to prosecutors. He took aim and fired several shots, prosecutors say, killing two men and seriously injuring a third.

Pina's defense attorney contended that Pina acted only in self-defense and thought the Santa Ana gang had mistaken his gang for another gang. While he was awaiting trial, Pina was stabbed nine times with an ice pick in the shower of the maximum-security section of county jail.

Pina was already on parole for a gang-related voluntary manslaughter conviction when the shooting happened. He was sentenced in February 1989 to 42 years to life in state prison for two counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, with sentencing enhancements for the personal use of a firearm and inflicting great bodily injury.

The parole board on Wednesday took into account the facts of the case, Pina's failure to take responsibility for the murders and his record in prison, the District Attorney's Office said. Pina's prison record includes violations for mutual combat, twice making great-bodily-injury threats, smoking, being in possession of contraband hobby tools, disobeying orders and, most recently, being in possession of tattoo paraphernalia in 2007, prosecutors said.

Contact the writer: 714-704-3777 or dirving@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/news/-302046--.html