SACRAMENTO -- Up to 33,000 prisoners in California may be entitled to release earlier than scheduled because the state has miscalculated their sentences, corrections officials said Wednesday.
For nearly two years, the overburdened state prison agency has failed to recalculate the sentences of those inmates despite a series of court rulings, including one by the California Supreme Court. The judges said the state applied the wrong formula when crediting certain inmates for good behavior behind bars.
Some inmates released in recent months almost certainly stayed longer in prison than they should have, said corrections officials, employees and advocates for prisoners. Some currently in prison most likely should be free, they said. But many whose sentences are too long are not scheduled to be released for months or years.
The inmates in question -- 19% of the state prison population -- are serving consecutive sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses. The sentencing errors range from a few days to several years.
Corrections officials say they have been unable to calculate the sentences properly because of staffing shortages and outdated computer systems that force analysts to do the complex work by hand.
Keeping prisoners institutionalized for too long wastes millions of dollars a year. A preliminary analysis of the problem in August by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation concluded that the longer sentences boost the state's already swollen prison population by 600 inmates a day, at a cost of nearly $26 million annually.
The state has about 173,000 prisoners and has undertaken the addition of 53,000 more beds because of overcrowding -- a situation that has helped erode the state's shaky finances.
"This is another function of the overcrowding crisis," said Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, a Bay Area group that represents inmates in court. "They have to handle the number of prisoners who are in the system. They can't meet their medical or mental health needs. Now it appears that there is some reason to believe that they can't even calculate their release dates correctly."
Specter said prisoners who are kept too long would have grounds to sue the corrections department.
Scott Kernan, the state's chief deputy secretary for adult prison operations, said the department hopes to hire 85 more analysts to begin working on the problem.
