Sunday, January 5, 2014
The title of this post comes from this report by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Introduction of which begins:
In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Plata, which found that the overcrowded conditions of the California penal system violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. The case represented the culmination of many challenges to California state prison conditions of confinement regarding medical, mental health, and dental services.
The Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by about one-third, or 33,000 people, by May 2013. Faced with this order, along with legislative mandates and budgetary constraints, California made a momentous decision: it would no longer take into state facilities or under state custody most people convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses; instead, counties would deal with these individuals at the local level. In turn, many of the solutions adopted by California’s 58 counties would involve diverting parole violators and low-level felony offenders away from prison and into county court systems.
In October 2011, California’s realignment plan went into effect, offering an opportunity to help achieve both a significant decrease in California’s prison population and shape the lives of incarcerated individuals through an increased focus on education, job training and reentry, among other measures.
Instead, nearly two years later many questions remain unanswered, even as the state continues to request that federal judicial oversight over state prisons be terminated.