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."
[Justice Samuel Alito wrote,] "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."
Supreme Court stands firm on prison crowding
By Joan Biskupic,
USA Today
Updated 5/24/2011 9:58 a.m.
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."
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