Absurd: Supreme Court rules California has to release 30k prisoners due to inadequate health care (Updated)
And they say elections don’t matter…the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 just resulted in the release of thousands of convicts into the general population. And every Democrat SCOTUS appointee still on the bench (along with the mercurial Anthony Kennedy) is culpable as well.
The court said in a 5-4 decision that the reduction is “required by the Constitution” to correct longstanding violations of inmates’ rights to adequate care for their mental and physical health. In 2009, the state’s prisons averaged nearly a death a week that might have been prevented or delayed with better medical care.
The order mandates a prison population of no more than 110,000 inmates, still far above the 80,000 the system was designed to hold.
There were more than 143,000 inmates in California’s 33 adult prisons as of May 11, so roughly 33,000 inmates will need to be transferred to other jurisdictions or released.
“The violations have persisted for years. They remain uncorrected,” Justice Anthony Kennedy, a California native, wrote for the court. The lawsuit challenging the adequacy of mental health care was filed in 1990.
To emphasize the conditions, Kennedy took the unusual step of including photos of overcrowding, including cages where mentally ill inmates were held while they awaited a bed.
The court’s four Democratic appointees joined with Kennedy in upholding a court order issued by three federal judges in California, all appointees of President Jimmy Carter.
Justice Scalia called the ruling “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history,” and he has a point: 18 other states joined California’s side, which lost. So 19 states may now find themselves forced to transfer or unleash thousands and thousands of convicts on an unsuspecting public. How many of these convicts are illegal aliens, and how many of those will get the proper justice of deportation rather than mere release?
That this insane ruling comes in the name of convicts’ health care puts the whole thing beyond parody. Our robed masters have really outdone themselves with this one.
Update: It looks like about 18,000 of California’s incarcerated convicts are illegal aliens.
The governor’s office estimates that in 2011 about 11.2 percent of individuals incarcerated in California prisons are illegal aliens (18,300 inmates). It costs the state about $938.6 million to house these undocumented immigrants, which translates to about $51,256.83 per person. The federal government is supposed to reimburse this cost via the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program; in reality, California only receives a 9.4 percent refund of the actual costs associated with incarcerating illegal aliens in its prisons.
Is the overcrowding also a consequence of 3 strikes and you are out? Are there many prisoners who are drug users as opposed to violent criminals?
Does your questions even matter? What matter is that the majority of those men was put in jail because they broke the law and was found guilty by a jury of their peers. Now, the United States is saying if the state needs to save money it is okay to release criminals regardless of their status (after all, it won’t be the Supreme Court who will be reviewing the status of the prisoners). Why have jails if people will be released to save money? Not putting them in jail in the first place saves money as well.
How pedantic. The over-lawyered, over-lawed US has been incarcerating any and all in a misled mad rush to outlaw anything we screwed up voters deem offensive. If CA is freeing only the least violent of these criminals, it’s a step in the right direction.
“If CA is freeing only the least violent of these criminals, it’s a step in the right direction.”
Now THIS is pedantic. I wonder what criteria you will establish to determine the “least violent of these criminals” (not even stopping to realize the inherent contradiction in the statement).
The least violent are easy to recognize because they are not violent at all. They are the prisoners who were incarcerated not because they harmed someone, but because the majority disapproves of their choice to consume certain substances. In other words, they are locked up not because they are bad, but because they are unpopular. The tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.
If the authoritarian minded were not so concerned with preventing people from consuming certain substances by any means necessary, we wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem.
But sadly this ruling will not affect the release of the unpopular who are innocent of any real crime. It will result in actual criminals being released to the detriment of us all. Criminals whose time behind bars has increased the threat they pose to the rest of us. The next time some poor girl is raped by a serial offender in California, it will be the fault of those who chose to stuff our prisons with the unpopular.
The three strikes laws are completely valid when applied to actual crimes. Sadly they are just as readily applied to non-crimes such as drug consumption.
I want those guilty of actual felonies locked up. If they keep committing crimes then lock them up for life and/or shoot them in the back of the head. I want serial drug users left alone unless and until that drug use results in the commission of an actual crime.
Lee, I want to vote for you for president. You make far too much sense to be elected, of course.
i was wondering when the tatler would get to this one
first off, california has not had a death row execution in 7 or 8 years (at least)
i would start firing up the execution chamber again (one of the main features of the death penalty is a deterrent factor— no executions no deterrents)
next, how many of these criminals are illegals
any illegal in a california jail needs to be deported pronto
start with these measures then see where we stand
Great idea! Let’s start with tax cheats and then move to child support evaders. We’ll have a just society in no time!
And if not, at least we tried.
As usual, Scalia’s dissent is worth the read. It begins on page 59– see link below. Thomas joined….
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-1233.pdf
‘Jail’ versus ‘prison’ is one of the most misunderstood of the judicial systems….thanks in no small way to the ignorance of the media. Theres more history and data to be learned than most are willing to invest the time in to understand those systems and what they have become today.
To do any remote justice to this topic one should take inventory of the thousands upon thousands State prison inmates that were historically incarcerated upon conviction and sentencing by the county’s jail systems. How and why this changed is most critical to this subject. In other words 100′s of criminal and vehicle code misdemeanors are now reclassified as felonies and sentencing/incarceration is done to States prisons.
Foregoing a very long dissertation, each State has thousands of State Prision (1000′s in some States) inmates that should be matters of city and county community/incarerations and can be, within this topic, easily and safely released back to the communities.
State prison systems have long become and economic ‘industry’ especially, in many rural communities.
With an economy this bad, a jobless non-recovery, and throwing Israel under the bus…you are going to have to find new leftist Democratic voters someplace.
http://www.rockthevote.com/election-center/voting-ex-felon/
I too wonder how many of those have been incarcerated for petty drug crimes. Every year we fill our prisons full of non-violent “criminals” who’s only offense was the possession of an arbitrary amount of drugs. Perhaps this will be the impetus for the end to the useless and destructive “war on drugs”.
I’m very much anti-drugs but I do understand your point in terms of reclassification of misdemeanors to low level felonies. For ecample in many states. Vehicle code violators may be placed on probation for misdemeanor offenses. Repeat offending will bring a person to a point of a probation vilolation charge in which that probation violation is classified as a low level felony and off to State prison. The list of such nonsense has grown to be very long.
The Secretaries of Correctes establishes the bed count either consistent with law or in violation of law. By the same token in all States the Secretarys office reports each week the the States presiding criminal court judges the number of bed openings to be filled. They have to keep the beds filled to keep their budgets justified and their employees, employed.
The cost of corrections has long outweighed the benefit of employment for which corrections was reestablished several decades ago, as an economic industry in many rural areas across the nation.
Will anybody clean up this mess? I doubt it, as the general public has very little interest in local, state or federal corrections no matter the cost to them. It only comes to public attention when some courts hands are forced on the issue and orders releases….then the subject soon goes away again. On the other hand, the mention of building more prisons raises the hair on these same peoples necks who want to generally ignore the corrections problems and costs. A fickle people today!
Note to self: Buy more ammo.
They should start by deporting foreign nationals back to their country of origin. I suspect that would cover a great deal of these…
The prisons are crowded because everything’s a crime. We should reform our drug laws. That would immediately end prison overcrowding everywhere, save tens of billions and deprive the enemies of our civilization of billions more. Instead we get a scare story with an addendum about 18,000 illegal immigrants. No one advocates releasing violent offenders. If a few thousand non-violent illegals are released so what? If we can’t deport them, I guess they’ll have to fit in with the 12-20 million others here.
Let’s do a buy of big billboards with pinpoint google map locations of Justice Kennedy’s house/houses so that any released prisoners who specialize in home invasion can thank him and his family personally.
in california prisons, “nonviolent drug offenders” garner sympathy and the impression that these people were just smoking a doobie when they were ambushed by police, the dea, narcotics detectives, etc… is one that needs to be addressed
here in california, prisoners incarcerated and held only for marijuana charges is roughly 1-2%
those held only for marijuana possession are roughly 0.7%
while those held on a 1st time offense/marijuana possession: 0.3%
most convicts in california are repeat offenders or parole violators not some poor sap smoking pot in his house
http://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/whos_in_prison_for_marij.pdf
Again, the whole issue of this topic breaks down into two categories.
1. The hundreds of misdemeaner crimes reclassifed as low level felonies.
2. Community corrections versus State and Federal corrections.
On the larger picture, does not the fact that the U.S. has more incarcerated persons than any other society on the face of this earth by gross margins, give you pause? Either we are a totally broken society from the bottom up or…..there is a better way to address crimes, convictions and sentencing.
Since state sentencing requires a minimum of one year, consider the national average cost of $24K per inmate per year….$4 per day probation and $8 per day of parole per individual. Community corrections is substantially less and much tougher time.
Add to this a simple fact. Crime and punishment in the U.S. is ‘designed’ to fail society at large. How might that be, you ask? It sentences persons to jail and prison then ‘dumps’ them out right back into the same environment and circumstance for which gets them into trouble. By in large nobody hires or cares about convicts and thusly, they are forced to serve a life sentence back into a life long circular pattern of crime for survival….in a world so few are willing to understand and do something about for positive change. Mental health is not a standalone solution. Education inside the corrections system is a wasted effort when few in society will hire them and hone their new found skills…..and the problems list continues. In addition, most States give a life sentence to these people by permanently taking away some of their U.S. constitutional rights as American citizens.
When the system is broken you have few choices and in this case, it is limited to collect more and more taxes each and build more and more prisons, release inmates or, seek better crime and punishment solutions.
We have become a very sick, broken and individualist society who no longer cares about each other in our communities. This is why the social justice folks find it so easy to make the advances they do in our society today….a strategic circumstance of human nature they have created and manipulated and cultivated for decades. They are experts at creating problems for which will eventually bring social/econoimic demise and then of course they have their very special solutions in the waiting. I find it rather amusing at all the folks who cast condemnation their way but are active particiapants in their strategies.
I don’t mind that they are being released. A lot of these men are in jail merely because they failed to make their wives sufficiently happy, or raised their voices in a domestic dispute.
Read ‘Feminist Gulag’ by Stephen Baskerville :
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/family/2705-feminist-gulag-no-prosecution-necessary
A ‘protect women’ conservative is the leftist’s best friend. Such conservatives fall over each other to out-left a leftist when an opportunity to appear needy in front of women presents itself.
At least the people who will suffer the most from these released criminals are the products of feminism themselves – single mothers and clubgoing sluts.
I am sorry California, you brought this on yourselves. You keep allowing illegal aliens to over run your state and they are breaking your budget. California keeps importing poverty and now there are not taxpayers to support them all.. Live and learn, we tried with Prop 187 and it was shot down. Now we all suffer the consequences.