A PANEL of federal judges in California has forcefully rejected a Schwarzenegger administration proposal to ease prison overcrowding, threatening to impose their own plan for reducing the inmate population if the state does not submit an acceptable one within three weeks.
The judges said Californian officials had failed to comply with their order to produce a plan to pare the number of state prisoners by 40,000 within two years. The panel agreed to postpone a decision on a request by inmates’ lawyers to hold Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in contempt of court for defying the earlier order, issued on August 4th.
The state’s plan, submitted on September 18th, also failed to specify how much lower the number of inmates would be after six, 12, 18 and 24 months, as the judges had demanded.
“We will view with the utmost seriousness any further failure to comply with our orders,” said the seven-page decision by US district judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, and 9th US circuit court of appeals judge Stephen Reinhardt. That would leave the court “with no alternative but to develop a plan independently and order it implemented forthwith.”
Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Rachel Arrezola said the state would respond to the order by its November 12th deadline. She said the administration is continuing to appeal to the US supreme court judges’ “arbitrary” reduction order, which was filed last month.
Wednesday’s developments raise the possibility that the federal courts might again seize power from state officials. In 2006 Judge Henderson took over the system of inmate medical care from Mr Schwarzenegger and handed it to a receiver who reports directly to the judge.
“The court is basically saying, ‘Do we have to take control of this away from you too? It’s your responsibility,’” said Donald Specter, director of the non-profit Prison Law Office in Berkeley, which represents some of the plaintiffs in the case.
Although courts have capped the population of jails in the past, no federal panel has ordered a population reduction over a state’s objections under a 1996 federal law that made it harder for such actions to take place, according to Michael Bien, another lawyer for inmates.
California’s case could be the first to test that law before the US supreme court.
The push to reduce overcrowding stems from the judges’ ruling in a pair of inmate lawsuits. They said the teeming conditions of the state prison system, which contains almost 170,000 people, is the main cause of medical and mental healthcare that is so poor it violates the US constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Inmates have long been stuffed into dormitories, hallways and other makeshift living spaces in institutions so strapped that Judge Henderson once said nearly an inmate a week was dying needlessly. Mr Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that the system is in crisis and that overcrowding should be reduced.
However, he has fought the oversight of federal judges, saying they have run amok on a host of issues besides prisons, including state budget cuts and the protection of endangered species. “They are going absolutely crazy,” Mr Schwarzenegger said. “They’ve got to let us run the state.”
The plan the governor gave the judges last month to reduce overcrowding would have cut the prison population by about 18,000 after two years, less than half of what had been ordered. It also relied heavily on the construction of new prisons, even though the judges had previously discounted that option because the state had proven unable to move ahead on such plans for the last two years.
Matthew Cate, the governor’s corrections chief, said the administration’s plan reduced the prison population only as much as state officials felt they could manage safely.
But the judges pointed out that Mr Schwarzenegger had previously advocated a more far-reaching plan to reduce the number of inmates – by 37,000 over two years – with a variety of measures including home detention and sentencing changes. They ordered the state to provide information on the legislative plan, suggesting that they could impose parts of it if the state does not come up with an alternative.
If state leaders do not find an acceptable plan, the judges said, they will give inmates’ lawyers two weeks to propose a solution as well before imposing one on their own.