Photo by Luke Thomas
By Julia Cheever
June 3, 2008
A three-judge federal panel has set a Nov. 17 date for a trial in San Francisco, if no settlement has been reached, on whether there should be a cap on the population of the state’s overcrowded prisons.
A population limit, which could lead to an early release of prisoners, is being sought by inmates in two civil rights lawsuits filed over substandard medical and mental health care.
Their attorneys say a cap may be the only way to bring prison health care up to constitutional standards.
The state currently houses 159,500 inmates in 33 adult prison facilities originally designed for about 84,000 prisoners.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson signed the trial date order Friday after lawyers for inmates and the state told the panel during a San Francisco hearing that they hadn’t agreed on a settlement.
But the two sides asked for another 30 days to try to reach an agreement, working with a draft proposed by a court-appointed referee. They are due to report back to the panel at another hearing on June 27.
The state and inmate attorneys said they planned to form a committee to consider what the maximum target population of the prisons should be.
Referee Elwood Lui, a former state appeals court justice, proposed in a report last month that the population should be reduced to 132,500 inmates, or 158 percent of the designed capacity, by 2012. The proposed limit could be raised as new prison space is built.
Lui announced the general terms of the proposal May 19 and the full draft proposal was made public by the court Monday.
The proposal would reduce inmate numbers through a combination of diversion of low-risk offenders to county programs; alternatives to incarceration for lower-level parole violators; and improvement of existing early release programs.
In addition to Henderson, the judges on the panel are U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento and Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case is before a three-judge court because under a U.S. law on prison litigation, an order limiting inmate population can be made only by a panel of three federal judges and not by a district judge acting alone.
The Hunger Site
November 17, 2008 at 5:29 am
As a the fiance of a CDC inmate. I think that the cap should happen. My husband has been locked up 14 years. He has had two surgeries in prison. This last one they put six screws in his shoulder and now one is sticking through the bone. You ca actually feel the grooves of the screw. He has been living with this for months now. They pumpp him full of pain pills but have yet to fix the problem they created. The prison is over crowded. His facility is meant to house 2000 inmates. There are six thousand inmates in there. That is bad. How can you justify that. Thats like having 8 people living in a two bedroom apartment. I know people derserve to punished for the crimes they commit but substandard conditions is not they way to do it.
June 3, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Your numbers differ on population that what the state gives on its web site for its prisons. They say they have an access of 170,000 plus prisoners for 100,000 real spots.