Those 100-plus bunk beds are now gone. Prisoners are no longer using an open bathroom, where the smell was barely tolerable. The conditions are certainly not luxurious, but for the first time in recent memory all inmates are sleeping in cells that were designed to house them.
Nearly two years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that California’s prison system was so bad that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, the changes are, in some ways, readily apparent. The state is still a long way from reducing the prison population by 30,000, as the court mandated.
Nonetheless, Gov. Jerry Brown declared this month that “the prison emergency is over in California,” arguing that the federal courts should relinquish control of the state prison system and that placing more demands on correctional facilities was simply “nit-picking.”
“At some point, the job’s done,” Mr. Brown said during a fiery news conference on Jan. 8 in Sacramento, the state capital, where he defended the prison system. California has spent billions of dollars to comply with federal demands, he said: “We can’t pour more and more dollars down the rathole of incarceration.”
But a court-appointed monitor said in papers filed last week that Mr. Brown’s demand to end oversight is “not only premature, but a needless distraction” that could affect care for mentally ill inmates. The monitor cited dozens of suicides and long periods of isolation instead of treatment.
The leaky toilets have been boarded up at the prison in this suburban city east of Los Angeles. Inmates waiting to see a doctor are placed in holding pens that once doubled as cells in the hallways. Prisoners are being let out into the yard more often, as officers are less concerned that their time out of cells will inevitably lead to tensions.
Critics, including the lawyers who sued the state on behalf of prisoners, say that many of the changes are nothing more than cosmetic and that the system still does not provide adequate care to physically or mentally ill inmates.
“We’re wasting a lot of money on nonsense,” Mr. Brown said. “Everybody wants to send people to prison. Nobody wants to pay for it.”
Many advocates, had hoped that the court rulings would prompt more changes in the state’s aggressive sentencing laws, and submitted papers showing that there would be no uptick in crime rates if more prisoners were released. Officials have argued that they have already released the lowest-level offenders and that further releases would threaten public safety, even if there were no increase in overall crime.
“The state refuses to engage with the fundamental problem, which is that we incarcerate far too many people for far too long,” said Allen Hopper, a policy director with theAmerican Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What has gotten us into this mess in the first place is the constant ratcheting up of sentencing laws.”
California is expected to spend $8.6 billion on prisons this year, the third-largest chunk of the state’s total budget, just behind public schools and health care.
It now has roughly 130,000 prisoners, with 119,000 housed in state prisons. That is a significant drop from 162,500 in 2006, the height of the crisis. But it is still nearly 10,000 more than what the courts said they would allow by a June 2013 deadline. Nearly 8,900 inmates are in out-of-state facilities. Most of the inmates shed by the state prisons were lower-level offenders who were sent to county jails.
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