Now that the dust has settled on the Supreme Court's ruling in Plata v. Schwarzenegger, which orders California to reduce its prison population, it's time for state officials and legislators to start planning how to comply. Actually, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has already been taking steps to reduce the prison population for some time now. These include, per CDCR's list (PDF link), transferring inmates out of state to private prisons; implementing parole reforms to reduce reliance on state prison as a sanction for parole violations; constructing new prison hospital facilities; and expanding the good-time credits program for prisoners who participate in rehabilitation programs.
As of this week (PDF), CDCR reports a total population of 161,836, of which 142,951 are held in the prisons covered by the Plata order. That's down from the all-time high of over 170,000 prisoners in 2006, when Gov. Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency. In fact, California's prisons are now at their lowest level of overcrowding -- just 179.6% of design capacity! -- since 1992. To comply with the Plata order, however, CDCR needs to get that number down to 137.5%, or about 33,000 additional inmates.
So, how can California do it? Gov. Jerry Brown's preferred proposal is called "realignment." Brown signed legislation in April that would "realign" responsibility for the lowest-level offenders down the county level. To be clear, this doesn't mean that current state inmates would be transferred to county jails. Rather, going forward, anyone newly sentenced to less than three years would serve his or her term in a local jail instead of state prison. But county sheriffs have expressed concern that the state will not follow through with adequate funding. If so, California could end up merely replacing its prison overcrowding problem with a jail overcrowding problem.
Another option is to transfer CDCR inmates out-of-state. Right now, the CDCR reports that a total of 9,816 California prisoners are held in private prisons in Arizona, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Michigan. There are plenty of reasons to have serious reservations about relying on private prisons as a tool for compliance with Plata -- later this week I'll try to post about some of the problems other states have encountered with private prisons. More fundamentally, shuttling prisoners out-of-state enables California to avoid confronting the deeper problems that landed it in this position in the first place, such as the state's dysfunctional Rube Goldberg apparatus of sentencing law and policy, and the persistent legislative intransigence in Sacramento. But in the short term, private prisons could offer a tempting escape route for bringing the numbers down in the state prisons covered by Plata.
A final policy option would be aggressive expansion of parole and reentry services. California has more than 100,000 men and women under parole supervision statewide (in part because California has long kept a far higher percentage of released prisoners under a parole officer's supervision than any other state). A large driver of prison overcrowding in California has been the constant churning of parolees in and out of prison on parole violations, a situation Californians refer to as "life on the installment plan." In this 2006 article, a California man who'd initially been sentenced to 16 months for auto theft ended up cycling in and out of prison for six years on parole violations. Pouring resources into county social services and local reentry programs that help men and women who get out of prison to stay out of prison would reduce the prison population, and also help the actual prisoners.
