Brown v. Plata
By: Melissa Riess on June 17, 2011
“A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.” With these words, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority in Brown v. Plata, affirmed a lower court decision finding that the standard of medical care and living conditions in California’s prisons violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In the 5-4 decision, issued May 23, the court affirmed a three-judge panel’s finding that other efforts by the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to remedy the constitutional violations had failed, and that the Department’s only remaining recourse is to reduce California’s prison population.
This decision is the latest in a class action lawsuit that began in 2001. People incarcerated in California prisons sued the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for failing to provide constitutionally adequate medical care. Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, plaintiffs requested as a remedy that the state cap the prison population until it could bring the level of care to constitutional standards. The statute provides that such a remedy may be imposed only on a finding by a panel of three federal judges that the primary cause of the constitutional violations is prison overcrowding.
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California’s prison population has grown dramatically in recent years; over the course of the Plata litigation, the population has averaged around 160,000, 190% of the system’s designed capacity. Proceedings before the three-judge panel, including a 14-day trial, produced extensive testimony about conditions inside California’s prisons. In 2009 the three-judge panel found that overcrowding was the primary cause of the constitutional violations, and requested the state to submit a plan to bring the population to 137.5% of the system’s designed capacity. In an Order issued in 2010, the three-judge panel gave the state two years to reduce the prison population by 40,000.
The Supreme Court affirmed this Order in its decision last month on California’s appeal. In the 58-page decision, Justice Kennedy notes many of the details that came out of the proceedings before the three-judge panel regarding the conditions inside California prisons: people stacked in “triple-bunks” in prison gymnasiums because of insufficient cell space; backlogs of up to 700 awaiting medical care; 54 people sharing a single toilet. The suicide rate in California prisons is 80% higher than the national average in prisons, and the wait to receive mental health care can last as long as 12 months.
Justice Kennedy discusses some alternatives available to the state for reducing the population, including building more facilities, and transferring inmates to local, out-of-state, and privately-operated facilities. The opinion does not mandate that the state adopt a particular approach; it merely approves the lower court’s order that a reduction in the population of the system is constitutionally required. The Court acknowledges the difficulty of the problem and extends the amount of time the state has to comply to five years.
Earlier in the year, Governor Jerry Brown ordered thousands of prisoners serving shorter sentences to be transferred to county-run jails, but this policy has been stalled while the state legislature ensures funding for the counties to handle this influx of prisoners. Transferring inmates to county facilities will alleviate some of the strain on the California prison system, but the counties are struggling with funding as many other previously state-provided services are being “realigned” to the local level. Many commentators (including Hastings faculty) argue that prison over-crowding is a symptom of the state’s broken sentencing policy, and transferring inmates to different facilities will do little to fix the underlying problem; they advocate a shift in criminal justice policy away from longer sentences and towards education and re-entry programs for people who have served time.
The state’s ability to comply with the Order depends on its political will to dedicate the funding required for prison population reduction. The prison medical care emergency is just one of the many public services emergencies (mental health, education, aging infrastructure) that are placing demands on California’s budget.
