Supreme Court tackles Calif. prison issues

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — A majority of Supreme Court justices expressed impatience with California's long-running prison problems and poor inmate medical care in a vigorous oral argument session Tuesday.

"At some point the court has to say: You have been given enough time. The constitutional violation still persists, as the state itself acknowledges," Justice Anthony Kennedy said.

Kennedy and the four liberal justices seemed ready to reject California's stance that it can solve its prison dilemma without the involvement of federal judges.

The case, drawing broad interest from public health and psychiatric health groups, civil libertarians and law enforcement, brings to the fore the power of U.S. judges to intervene in social problems that are traditionally the domain of elected state officials.

California officials, backed by 18 states, are appealing an order by a special three-judge U.S. district court that would require the state to reduce prison overcrowding significantly to improve conditions. California says the court order could mean the release of about 40,000 inmates to the streets.

The three-judge panel said earlier measures, including those aimed at increasing staff and improving care, had failed to improve the system sufficiently. The judges concluded that overcrowding was the primary cause of the health problems and ordered the state to get the system down to 137.5% of prison capacity over the next two years.

The order came in a pair of class-action lawsuits challenging mental health and medical conditions, one that began in 1990, the other 2001.

Prisoners' lawyers describe horrific conditions in their filings, saying 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." They stress that such conditions have been ongoing.

In decades past, federal judges often got involved to speed school desegregation, solve environmental problems and remedy conditions in mental health facilities and prisons. That era has faded for many reasons, including that the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has reversed lower court judges who delved in recent decades into social needs.

The competing interests were on display as liberal justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that the challenge to prison conditions dates back 20 years and "there were something like 70 (earlier) orders from the district court" intended to improve the system.

"So how much longer do we have to wait?" she asked.

Chief Justice John Roberts, among conservative justices more sympathetic to California, said state governments, however, could end up under an array of court orders on issues — on schools, the environment, people with disabilities — that should be decided by legislative policy.

"One of the things that concerns me is that the state is responsible for a lot of different things," he said. "It's a budget prioritization that the state has to go through every day, and now it's being transferred from the state Legislature to federal district courts."

California officials have acknowledged the dire situation in their prisons but say that they are working on it and that the three-judge court imposed a mandate that is nearly impossible to meet and violates federal law on prison litigation.

If the lower court's order stands, California says, it will have to reduce its prison population "by roughly 38,000 to 46,000 within two years." The system has housed an estimated 165,000 prisoners, although lawyer Carter Phillips, representing the state Tuesday, said that has dropped in recent months to about 147,000.

Phillips urged the justices to reverse the lower court, saying its measure was extreme and could endanger public safety.

"I guarantee you that there is going to be more crime and people are going to die on the streets of California," he said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, among the justices most exasperated with the state's position, told Phillips to "slow down from the rhetoric and give me concrete details" of state alternatives to reducing crowding.

Justice Stephen Breyer referred to a "friend of the court" brief filed by the Prison Fellowship and several religious groups that says California has failed for decades to provide adequate medical and mental health care to prisoners and refers to confinement in cages. He said that showed a "horrendous problem." The fourth liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also voiced concern about California's ability to address the problem without the court order.

Kennedy, who leans conservative and is often a key vote on ideologically divided cases, worried about state delays in fixing the system but also questioned the specific order that California reduce its prison population by 137.5%. He suggested reducing crowding by less could solve the problems.

Berkeley lawyer Donald Specter, who represented the inmates, told the justices California's prisons now house twice as many people as they were built to hold. He argued that the overcrowding violates constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The more conservative justices scrutinized Specter's position most intensely. Roberts questioned whether the three-judge court had given sufficient weight to any impact the release could have on public safety.

Justice Samuel Alito warned the release would bring more crime to California streets.

The states siding with California are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

A ruling in Schwarzenegger v. Plata is likely by late June when the justices traditionally recess for the summer.

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