Judges to study cap on prisons - Impatient with state efforts to deal with crowding, jurists call for a panel that could limit inmate numbers.

The move -- the first for a state prison system -- has the potential to prompt early release of inmates. Experts and elected officials, however, said that less-drastic measures might appease federal courts and that releases, if necessary, could be made in ways that minimize any threat to the public.

The rulings are an escalation of federal intervention in California's prisons, which now house nearly 173,000 inmates, 17,000 of them in gymnasiums, day rooms, classrooms and other areas not designed as dormitories. Prompted by class-action lawsuits on behalf of inmates, federal courts have declared the level of medical and mental health care in the prison system unconstitutional and turned over healthcare operations to a court-appointed receiver.

Inmates' attorneys sued to request a population cap in November 2006, five weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in the prisons. The lawyers suggested that instead of releasing thousands of prisoners, state officials could use home detention, electronic monitoring or residential drug treatment programs to divert low-risk convicts and parole violators from prison.

"I'm really pleased," said Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in San Quentin. "We fought long and hard for this."

In separate rulings, U.S. District Judges Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento and Thelton Henderson of San Francisco concluded that a $7.4-billion prison reform package enacted by the Legislature and Schwarzenegger in May could worsen prison conditions because it calls for adding beds without bolstering staff.

The judges expressed hope that the governor and Legislature would swiftly find ways to make early release of prisoners unnecessary.

Henderson called early release "a radical step."

"This court would like nothing more than to have the three-judge court be able to enter a consent judgment without the need for a prisoner release order," he wrote.

In a written statement, Schwarzenegger said he would appeal the ruling, but he also expressed confidence that recent efforts to reduce overcrowding -- including the forcible transfer of 40 inmates to a Mississippi prison last week -- would satisfy the courts. Nearly 400 inmate volunteers had already been sent to prisons in Arizona and Tennessee.