SACRAMENTO -- — A proposed legal settlement in a high-profile federal court case on California prison overcrowding would vastly reduce the number of state inmates without releasing criminals early, by diverting low-risk offenders to community-based rehabilitation programs and county jails.
The draft agreement emerged after six months of negotiations among state officials, advocates for inmates, local law enforcement leaders and two mediators appointed by a panel of three federal judges. The judges are scheduled to meet in 10 days, and are expected to proceed to trial if a settlement has not been reached by then.
Many constituencies must sign off on the proposal, including Republican legislators and some local law enforcement officials, who have been wary of removing even low-level criminals from prison.
Instead of releasing prisoners early -- a controversial step that many state and local officials feared the judges would take -- the agreement would cut tens of thousands of inmates from the prison population by reducing the number who enter for short stays and those who churn through frequently on parole violations.
They would be given treatment and confined locally, including in home detention and by electronic monitoring. Ultimately, that would improve public safety and save high incarceration costs, participants in the negotiations said.
"It became apparent that we had a dangerous revolving door to the state prison system," California Court of Appeal Justice Peter Siggins, a settlement consultant who was one of the mediators, told reporters Monday. "And what we were trying to do with the settlement was trade that revolving door for a magnifying glass and really put these folks under scrutiny."
Those diverted from state prison would otherwise be serving a year or less. The median time served by nearly 45,000 inmates paroled for the first time in 2005 was less than a year, according to a report last year by the Little Hoover Commission, a state watchdog agency.
Parolees, many of whom return on violations such as failing a drug test, would also avoid prison if judged as low-risk according to an assessment tool devised by corrections officials.
By removing that group, the state and its opponents would hope to pare the prison population, which now stands at 171,000. The precise target would be worked out later by the state and inmates' lawyers. California's 33 prisons were built for less than 100,000 inmates, although prison experts have said they can safely hold more.
