Supreme Court Justices Hear Case on Prison Overcrowding

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a case that concerns whether or not overcrowding in California prisons, which has led to grossly unsanitary conditions and inadequate access to medical and mental health care, warrants a court ordered reduction of nearly 40,000 prisoners within 2 years.

Currently, California state prisons are at 200 percent capacity with some reaching 300 percent.  The state of California has admitted that overcrowding has led to high rates of preventable suicides, high rates of prisoners suffering from psychosis, outbreaks of serious and communicable diseases, and deaths due to neglect.

A federal three-judge court in 2009 not only found that the conditions caused by overcrowding violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but also issued an order requiring California to reduce its prison overcrowding to 137.5 percent of what it was intended to hold within two years.  A Pew study found that California reduced its population by 4,257 in 2009, the highest in the country.  But that’s a far cry from the 40,000 in two years required by the court order.

But the state of California said the court’s plan would endanger public safety, was based on an arbitrary number, and failed to consider that the state has already taken steps to reduce its inmate population.  The state said the plan should therefore be thrown out.  It notably did not challenge whether or not the conditions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but instead the solution offered by the federal court.

An amicus brief submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and others made the case that the prison and constitutional violations should be regarded as human rights abuses too.  Failing to provide prisoners with medical and mental healthcare is a violation of international law and the conditions in California prisons are out of compliance with human rights treaties that the U.S. has ratified such as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights.

These treaties, the brief argued, “demonstrate a growing consensus that prisoners have a right to adequate medical treatment including, where appropriate, mental health services; and that the failure of the state to provide such treatment can constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and in certain situations, torture.”

At oral argument, some of the justices seemed unmoved by California’s appeal to overturn the lower court’s ruling.   “When are you going to avoid the needless deaths that were reported in this record? When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state?” inquired Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was also skeptical about California’s recent efforts.  “You know, you have these judges who have been involved in these cases since the beginning, for 20 years in the Plata case, who thought, we’ve done everything we can, the receiver has done everything he can; this just isn’t going anywhere and it won’t go anywhere until we can address this root cause of the problem,” said Ginsburg.

Widely regarded as the keeper of the swing vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the federal court, “has to at some point focus on the remedy, and that’s what it did, and that it seems to me was a perfectly reasonable decision.”

Carter Phillips, an attorney representing the state of California argued “the reality is that anytime you say you are going to release 40,000 inmates in a very compressed period of time, I guarantee you that there is going to be more crime and people are going to die on the streets of California. I mean that – there is no way out of that particular box.”

Donald Specter of the Prison Law Office, a nonprofit law firm in Northern California that argued in favor of upholding the order, sought to dispel that notion.  He said that substantial reductions can be accomplished by not reincarcerating low-risk parolees for technical violations, awarding good time credits for well-behaved prisoners, releasing those who are elderly or infirm, and using out-of-state transfers.  Governor Schwarzenegger also submitted a revised plan to reduce the prison population by 37,000 in two years in 2009 along those lines, after the three-judge federal court rejected two other proposals by the state.

But not all justices were persuaded by Specter’s arguments. “That is a very indirect way of addressing the problem and it has collateral consequences. If — if I were a citizen of California, I would be concerned about the release of 40,000 prisoners. And I don’t care what you term it, a prison release order or whatever the terminology you used was,” intoned Justice Samuel Alito.

A decision is expected in the spring of 2011. The case is called Schwarzenegger v. Plata.

To read the transcript or listen to the audio click here.