Prisons Populations

The proportion of jailed or imprisoned Americans almost doubled in the last decade, but the growth has slowed recently, the Justice Department reported Sunday. An expert said the slower growth may be only temporary. As of June 30, federal, state and local prisons and jails held 615 men and women for each 100,000 U.S. residents, the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said. By comparison, there were 313 inmates per 100,000 residents at the end of 1985.

SHANGHAI - California Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday that he has asked his lawyers to review a new order from a panel of federal judges requiring him to file a fresh plan for reducing the state's prison population. The judges have threatened to hold state officials, including Brown, in contempt if they fail to comply within three weeks. "I did speak with my lawyers. I said, 'Take a good look at this stuff,'" Brown told reporters as he headed for a Huangpu River cruise with Yao Ming, a former NBA star turned Napa Valley winemaker.

SHANGHAI - California Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday that he has asked his lawyers to review a new order from a panel of federal judges requiring him to file a fresh plan for reducing the state's prison population. The judges have threatened to hold state officials, including Brown, in contempt if they fail to comply within three weeks. "I did speak with my lawyers. I said, 'Take a good look at this stuff,'" Brown told reporters as he headed for a Huangpu River cruise with Yao Ming, a former NBA star turned Napa Valley winemaker.

SACRAMENTO - California's progress in relieving its teeming prisons has slowed so much that it probably won't comply with a court-ordered population reduction, and judges have raised the prospect of letting some inmates out early. Three federal jurists have given the state until Friday to come up with a schedule for identifying prisoners "unlikely to reoffend or who might otherwise be candidates for early release" and to detail other ways to hasten the emptying of double-bunked cells.

Prison populations rose 4.7% in the first half of 1987, as a record 570,519 inmates jammed state and federal facilities, the Bureau of Justice Statistics said. Corrections officials had to add about 1,000 beds a week to keep up with the influx--a 7.8% increase in the West, 2.5% in the South, 4.6% in the Midwest and 5.1% in the Northeast, the bureau said. Criminologists attributed the increases to more stringent sentencing.

After reading the commentary by Vincent Schiraldi ("Some Gift--For $1.4 Billion, We Pay $31 Billion," March 15), I couldn't help but feel a sense of worry for California and the nation. Pity the victims if people like Schiraldi were to begin formulating correctional policy. While Californians should rightfully be concerned with the finances of the federal crime bill, money should not be the primary concern when formulating policy dealing with crime. Our main concern is, and should remain, the provision of public safety.

The number of people in state prisons last year increased at the slowest rate since 1971, though the total number of people incarcerated in the United States remained at a record high in 2000, the Justice Department reported. As of June 2000, 1,931,859 people were in federal, state and local facilities, a 3% increase over June 1999. The increase was primarily in the number of people in federal prisons, researchers said.

In the ongoing flap over prison overcrowding in California and what to do about it, little consideration has been given to inmates such as Stephan Lilly. I wrote about the Los Angeles man late last year, when his conviction on charges stemming from a scuffle with a security guard were counted as a third strike. Despite a years-long battle with schizophrenia, and the fact that one of the three strikes was a threat that involved no physical contact, Lilly got 25 to life.

State prison authorities Monday began reducing the number of parole violators sent back behind bars and offering inmates more opportunity to shorten their sentences, as part of a plan to decrease the prison population by 6,500 inmates over the next year. Low-risk offenders, including those convicted of nonviolent crimes, will not have regular supervision by a parole agent. And they will no longer be returned to prison for technical violations such as alcohol use, missed drug tests or failure to notify the state of an address change.

The nation's adult prison population grew a little more slowly last year after a 10-year surge that more than doubled the number of inmates, the Justice Department reported Sunday. The nation's federal and state prisons added 55,876 inmates, bringing the prison population to a record of just more than 1.18 million in 1996, as of Dec. 31. The additional prisoners represented a 5% increase over the previous year. Between 1985 and 1996, the average annual increase had been 8.

WASHINGTON - In January, Evin Adonis Ortiz was arrested and charged with killing a 24-year-old man in Los Angeles. After running Ortiz's fingerprints through an FBI database, police learned he was in the country illegally - and this wasn't his first arrest. Ortiz had convictions for driving without a license and attempted grand larceny. A congressional study released Tuesday found dozens of examples of illegal immigrants who were released and later arrested in connection with felonies, including murder.

So far, the only apparent solutions to California's budget crisis are increased revenues and draconian budget cuts. Legislative leaders have pledged to examine all options to avert further crippling reductions in state funding for higher education, the court system and social support for poor and vulnerable families. They should be looking at the state criminal justice system; there are savings that could help us avoid harsher cuts. To his credit, Gov. Jerry Brown has implemented budget and policy changes that have significantly reduced the state prison population and may reclaim up to $1 billion from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Reporting from Sacramento -- California should hold off on building new medical facilities for prison inmates, according to the legislative analyst's office. That view contradicts plans by the court-appointed receiver who has run the prison health system since a federal judge declared it unconstitutionally inadequate. He has plans for $2.3 billion in new clinics and upgrades. Construction is one of the final sticking points before the state can end six years of federal oversight of inmate medical care.

Reporting from Sacramento Cash-strapped Californians would rather ease "third-strike" penalties for some criminals and accept felons as neighbors than dig deeper into their pockets to relieve prison overcrowding, a new poll shows. In the wake of a court order that the state move more than 33,000 inmates out of its packed prisons, an overwhelming number of voters oppose higher taxes — as well as cuts in key state services — to pay for more lockup space. The survey , by The Times and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, shows a clear shift in attitude by residents forced to confront the cost of tough sentencing laws passed in recent decades.

A three-judge court that has ordered California to reduce its prison population issued strict deadlines Thursday for what will amount to a reduction of 37,000 inmates in two years. The special panel of federal judges set June 27, 2013, as the deadline for compliance, paying little heed to the U.S. Supreme Court's call for flexibility. In May, the high court cited California's cash crisis in suggesting that officials might need more time to resolve the overcrowding problem. The three-judge court ruled in August 2009 that conditions in state prisons violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Reporting from Sacramento -- California is in danger of violating the first court-ordered deadline for cutting its prison population unless lawmakers pass Gov. Jerry Brown's tax plan, state officials said Tuesday. Corrections chief Matthew Cate said the state must immediately begin overhauling the prison system to meet a November deadline to lower its head count by more than 10,000 inmates. But without funding from the Legislature for Brown's proposal to shift responsibility for some prisoners to county jurisdictions, the state cannot take action, he said.

Parolees are a major and growing factor in California's mushrooming prison population, and a study released Thursday by the state Department of Justice urges the state to find out if needlessly harsh parole terms are causing the problem. The study by Sheldon L. Messinger, a UC Berkeley law professor, found that 43.3% of the felons sent to state prisons last year were parole violators--more than four times the rate 10 years earlier.

Ordinarily, states rely on courts and prisons to protect the citizenry from criminals, but California seems determined to turn that convention on its head: Here, we need courts to protect criminals from the state's voters. The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Tuesday whether to overturn an order by a panel of three federal judges that the state reduce its prison population to 137.5% of capacity within two years, which would mean trimming the inmate count by about 25% from its current average of 165,000.

The suicide rate in California's overcrowded prisons is nearly twice the national average, and one inmate dies every eight days from inadequate medical care. These are just two indicators cited in the 15-year legal battle over whether the state's prisons are failing to provide humane medical care for the 165,000 inmates. On Tuesday, the problems of California's prisons will move to a national stage when the Supreme Court hears the state's challenge to an extraordinary court order that would require the prison population to be reduced by about 25% in two years.