The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has the dual role of incarcerating adults and juveniles who have been sentenced to prison for breaking the law, as well as providing a wide array of services during imprisonment to help inmates successfully re-enter society. Those “rehabilitation” services include: substance abuse treatment, mental health care, vocational training, high school and college education and transitional aftercare housing. The department encompasses 33 adult institutions, 46 conservation fire camps, nine community correctional facilities, five juvenile justice facilities and five contracted out-of-state facilities in three states. That convicts have been incarcerated out of state is a result of the prison system far surpassing the number of inmates it was intended to handle.

Secretary Responds to U.S. Supreme Court Ruling (CDCR blog)

The California prison system was created in 1912 by the state Legislature as the California State Detentions Bureau. In 1951 it was renamed the California Department of Corrections, and in 2004 it became the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The latter change was part of a major reorganization that was intended to emphasize the state’s responsibility to provide inmates with the training and education to successfully re-enter society following the completion of their sentences. The department-wide reorganization was ordered by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after an independent review noted that “California's $6 billion correctional system suffers from a multitude of problems – out-of-control costs; a recidivism rate far exceeding that of any other state; reported abuse of inmates by correctional officers; an employee disciplinary system that fails to punish wrongdoers; and the failure of correctional institutions to provide youth wards and inmates with mandated health care and other services.”

As with so many aspects of the state’s early years, the California Gold Rush played a leading role in the eventual evolution of a statewide prison system. The discovery of gold on Jan. 24, 1848, at Sutter’s Mill along the American River near what is now Sacramento meant a huge influx of people to the region. Unfortunately, the gold rush also brought a number of unsavory people. Many of these would eventually require incarceration. These circumstances led to the creation of one of the most famous prisons in the nation: San Quentin.

But before there was San Quentin, there was the 268-ton wooden ship named “The Waban,” which was anchored in San Francisco Bay and outfitted in 1851 to hold 30 inmates as the state’s first official prison (it was quickly at 300% of capacity). The state, meanwhile, had purchased 20 acres of land on Point Quentin, and using prisoners from The Waban and other prison ships, began building a permanent facility in 1852. Interestingly, the date that the first inmates were used as labor on the site was July 14, which is Bastille Day!

The prison was finished in 1854, and would eventually take up 432 acres of waterfront real estate. (The actual complex occupies 275 acres.)  Until 1933, it housed women as well as men. It remains the only death row for male inmates in California. Its gas chamber was refitted to accommodate lethal injections when the method of execution was changed in 1996.

Some of San Quentin’s most notable present and former inmates include: “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala, Polly Klaas killer Richard Allen Davis, Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), Eldridge Cleaver, Merle Haggard, jazz saxophone player Art Pepper, Sirhan Sirhan, pornographer Jim Mitchell, Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard Muhammad and Bruce Lisker, who was wrongly convicted of killing his mother in 1983 at age 17 and exonerated and released when he was 44. 

By 1858, San Quentin was so overcrowded that the legislature ordered a new prison built. It took 10 years to find and develop the site on the American River, and construction began in 1878. One of the benefits of the site was its proximity to an ample supply of native stone for the construction. Its first 44 inmates arrived on July 26, 1880, having taken a boat and then a train from San Quentin.  Inmates in the original structure spent more of their time in the dark behind solid boiler-plate doors in 4x8 stone cells with 6-inch eye slots. The prison, which has always had a reputation for being violent, was updated in 1986; in 2009 it housed 4,427 inmates (it was designed for 1,813). Folsom originally had a death chamber but its last execution was held on Dec. 3, 1937; since then, all executions have taken place in San Quentin.

Perhaps what’s best known nationally about Folsom Prison is the song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” by the late Johnny Cash. The baritone-voice country singer recorded the song in 1955 and had always been interested in performing it at a prison. So, on January 1, 1958, Cash played a concert at San Quentin, a concert that included “Folsom Prison Blues,” and is said to have helped set Merle Haggard, a 20-year-old San Quentin inmate, on the path toward becoming a country music legend in his own right. Haggard, who wrote and sang “Okie From Muskogee,” would later say of the Cash concert: “He had the right attitude. He chewed gum, looked arrogant and flipped the bird to the guards—he did everything the prisoners wanted to do. He was a mean mother from the South who was there because he loved us. When he walked away, everyone in that place had become a Johnny Cash fan." Years later, after a drug addiction had nearly wiped out his career, a reborn Cash came to Folsom Prison looking for a jumpstart. On Jan. 13, 1968, Cash, backed by June Carter, Carl Perkins, and his band, the Tennessee Three – Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on upright bass and drummer W.S. Holland – played two legendary shows before the inmates at Folsom. The shows were recorded and released as a 15-track album. The record reached No. 1 on the country charts and No. 15 nationally. 

At the turn of the millennium, the department was running at about 200% of design capacity, leading to a pair of lawsuits and an eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the state’s chronically overcrowded prisons constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

By the time Governor Schwarzenegger took office in 2003, California prisons were a mess. Federal investigations, out-of-control costs, accusations of abuse, substandard prisoner healthcare and allegations of a code of silence among guards to stymie investigations had played out in the media for years. Shortly after taking office, Governor Schwarzenegger tapped the man who had been governor during the prison system’s greatest expansion (1983-1991), George Deukmejian, to chair an independent review of the prison system. The panel’s report documented the collapse of the system following three decades of a radical, voter-directed transformation that included hundreds of new sentencing laws, 22 new prisons and dismantling of most rehabilitative programs.

Despite the report and Governor Schwarzenegger’s avowed aim to reform the penal system, by the time he left office in 2010 correctional costs had gone up, rehabilitation programs had not expanded and a self-declared moratorium on prison building had been broken. The annual cost of incarcerating a prisoner went from $28,000 in 2003 to $49,500 in 2010. The state Corrections budget grew from $6 billion to $8.2 billion.

Instead of the prison population declining a promised 15,000, it grew by 10,000. And a gubernatorial promise in 2004 to build no more prisons was immediately broken to open the state’s 33^rd facility in Delano the next year. The governor then signed the Public Safety and Offender Rehabilitation Services Act of 2007, which provided $7.7 billion to add 53,000 state prison and county jail beds, the largest single prison construction program in California history.

California’s system for handling juvenile offenders changed dramatically in 2007 when the state turned over responsibility for all but the most serious and violent youth offenders to the counties and provided counties with resources to handle the expanded population.

In 2009, the state adopted a new risk-assessment instrument for gauging the likely behavior of parolees and parole candidates, refocusing attention on high-risk offenders. One assessment of the enabling legislation said, “This bill has the potential to forever change California’s parole system, reducing the overall number of inmates placed on parole supervision, intensifying supervision for the most dangerous parolees, and systematically diverting less serious parolees to community-based programs.”

In an opinion handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 23, 2011, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”

The situation didn’t come about over night. Between 1988 and the middle of 2011, the state’s prison population exploded from 76,000 to 162,740.  The country’s most populous state has, not surprisingly, the highest number of prisoners. The CDCR, which employs nearly 65,000 people, is the second largest law enforcement or police agency in the United States, behind only the New York City Police Department, which employs approximately 34,000 police officers. As of 2009, CDCR employed roughly 29,000 correctional officers, 1,800 parole agents and 692 criminal investigators/special agents.

Although California has the most prisoners of any state in the country, its 2009 rate of incarceration (the number of citizens per 100,000 who are in jail or prison) was 458, which is about average. On the low end were Maine (150), Minnesota (189) and New Hampshire (206), and the states with the highest rates were Louisiana (881), Mississippi (702) and Oklahoma (657).

California’s burgeoning prison population might be seen as reflective of the nation as a whole: The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country, by far.  The New York Times, in a report published in 2008, noted that the U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population, but its 2.3 million criminals behind bars represent almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number, however, excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor.)

Looking at national incarceration rates, the United States comes in first, too, with 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in the population. Put another way, one in every 100 American adults is locked up. The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with an incarceration rate of 627. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151, Germany's is 88 and Japan's is 63. The median among all nations is about 125.

Prison Makes Way for Future, but Preserves Past (by Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times)

San Quentin State Prison (Wikipedia)

Folsom Prison: 130 Years of History (CDCR website)

A Retrospective View of Corrections Reform in the Schwarzenegger Administration (by Professor Joan Petersilia, Stanford Law School) (pdf)

Juvenile Justice Reform (Little Hoover Commission)

Solving California's Corrections Crisis (Little Hoover Commission)

A Review of the Governor's Reorganization Plan: Reforming California's Youth and Adult Correctional Agency (Little Hoover Commission) (pdf)

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is charged with the welfare of the state’s adult and juvenile prison population, including responsibility for the operation of the corrections, rehabilitation, probation and parole systems. The department has come under increasing pressure to emphasize its rehabilitation role in an effort to drastically cut the high rate of recidivism. 

The department has numerous boards, divisions and offices:

Adult Operations: This division essentially runs the adult prisons. It is made up of five mission-based field operations – Reception to process the incoming inmates, High Security/Transition for the most violent male offenders, General Population Level 2 and 3, for minimum to medium custody male inmates, General Population Level 3 and 4  for high-medium custody inmates, and Female Offenders and which handles the women’s prisons.

Each unit is headed by an associate director.

Adult Parole: Provides involvement of parole agents to encourage and assist parolees in their effort to reintegrate into the community. It is headed by a director.

Adult Programs: Provide effective evidence-based programs to adult offenders and create partnerships with community-based providers and the communities to which offenders return.

Board of Parole Hearings: Conducts parole consideration hearings, parole rescission hearings, parole revocation hearings and parole progress hearings for adult inmates and parolees. The BPH is made up of 12 commissioners who are appointed by the governor and subject to state Senate confirmation, deputy commissioners and administrative and legal staff.

Prison Health Care Services Contract Branch: Was created to improve and streamline the medical services for inmates in response to a legal challenge asserting that the prison system denied prisoners with some disabilities access to prison programs, services and activities in violation of federal law.

Council on Mentally Ill Offenders: Makes recommendations for responding to inmates with mental health needs. This council is charged with preparing an annual report for the CDCR secretary.

Division of Correctional Health Care Services: Responsible for treating and providing constitutional levels of care to inmates who live with serious mental illness and or need dental care services. Headed by a chief deputy secretary.

Facility Planning, Construction and Management: Acquire and effectively manage the department’s real estate requirements, including extensive construction of new prison beds contemplated as a solution to overcrowding. Headed by a senior chief who is appointed by the governor, and a chief deputy secretary

Corrections Standards Authority: An advisory board that helps coordinate local and state detention issues.

Juvenile Justice (DJJ): The division provides education and treatment to California’s youthful offenders up to the age of 25 who have the most serious criminal backgrounds and most intense treatment needs. Since replacing the California Youth Authority in 2005, most youthful offenders are committed to county facilities in their home communities. Though their numbers in the state system have been steadily declining, they nevertheless have many specialized needs. A 2004 consent decree in the matter of Farrell v. Cate imposes on the state strict guidelines for providing youthful offenders with adequate and effective care, treatment and rehabilitative services. Under pressure from the Prison Law Office, California correctional officials agreed to bring in national experts to help design a new state rehabilitative juvenile justice system. The division is headed by a chief deputy secretary. Within DJJ are divisions for Administration and Operations, Juvenile Facilities, Education Services, Juvenile Parole Operations and Juvenile Parole Board.

Juvenile Justice maintains five Youth Correctional Facilities – N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton (males), O.H. Close Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton (males), Preston Youth Correctional Facility in Ione (reception center-clinic and program facility for males), Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo (reception center-clinic for females and program facility for males and females),  and the Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic in Norwalk (reception center-clinic and program facility for males). DJJ also maintains two Youth Conservation Camps – Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp in Pine Grove, and the S. Carraway Public Service and Fire Center in Camarillo. The camps are for males and females.   As of Dec. 31, 2010, there were 1,254 young offenders in institutions or camps, 78 in adult correctional facilities and 1,509 on parole.

Prison Industry Authority: Was established as a semiautonomous state agency to operate the state’s prison industries in a manner similar to private industry. PIA develops and maintains work opportunities for inmates. It’s headed by a general manager.

State Commission on Juvenile Justice:  Commission was developed to provide a comprehensive master plan to enhance the performance of state and local agencies in effectively preventing and responding to juvenile crime. Commission is made up of 12 members.

Audits and Compliance: Safeguards public assets entrusted to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation through evaluative measures to ensure compliance with state and federal guidelines, departmental policies and court mandates. It is headed by an assistant secretary.

Office of Civil Rights: Website is intended to serve as a resource for all CDCR employees.

Office of Legal Affairs: Manages all litigation involving the Department; provides legal advice and assistance to the Secretary and staff of the Department; and represents the department in administrative proceedings. It is headed by an assistant secretary.

Office of Legislation: Provides executive policy advice and assistance on matters impacting the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It is headed by an assistant secretary.

Office of the Ombudsman: Provides management advice and consultation to the administration and makes recommendations to resolve critical issues that impact departmental policies, procedures and programs at specific institutions. 

Office of Research: Office is responsible for publishing a variety of reports ranging from statistical summaries of its adult and juvenile offender populations to evaluations of innovative rehabilitative treatment programs.  The office has three divisions: Adult, Juvenile and Offender Information Services.

Strategic Offender Management System: Project aims to consolidate existing databases and records to provide a fully automated system and replace manual paper.

Not surprisingly, the biggest chunk of the CDCR’s budget goes to Operations – General Security for Adult facilities. That’s $3.04 billion, or roughly 37% of the total budget.

Next up is $2.06 billion for Adult Heath Care Services. Adult Inmate Support gets $1.38 billion, and the Rehabilitation Administration is to receive $459.5 million. Juvenile Health Care will get $39.7 million and Operations – Security Overtime will take in $141.1 million.

The Sacramento Bee reported on May 17, 2011, prior to the Supreme Court order for California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates, that Governor Brown will be looking at the Corrections’ budget from which to target two-thirds of the roughly 5,500 state jobs he intends to cut from his revised state budget. The cuts assume that the state will be moving tens of thousands of inmates to local governments (and the Supreme Court ruling should only make that more necessary), which should allow CDCR to get a jump on the 3,600 jobs Brown is expected to cut from it. Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said that the department has unfilled positions in its budget that will absorb some of those loses. “Corrections,” The Bee noted, “is the state general fund’s biggest single departmental expense.”

Along those same lines, the movement of inmates to local governments is expected to lead to a significant reduction in expenditures for private and out-of-state prison costs. This year’s budget, for instance, assumes $410 million to private firms for housing California inmates. Next year, that expenditure should drop to $224 million.  And out-of-state prison costs are forecast to drop from $272 million to $148 million.

3-Year Budget (pdf)

California State Workforce Cuts Would Hit Prisons the Hardest (by Jon Ortiz, Sacramento Bee)

Juvenile Justice System

The juvenile justice system in California has undergone myriad changes over the years as the state struggles to find a humane way to incarcerate youthful offenders, keep them separate from the adult correctional population, encourage rehabilitation and not break the bank doing it.

Few would deem the effort a success.

The reviled California Youth Authority came under attack for years before being reorganized as part of a new Division of Juvenile Justice within the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2005. Yet the juvenile justice system remains fractured and in some ways has become more so as economic pressures drive a state solution that includes shifting more juvenile offenders into county facilities.

The five state-run youth correctional facilities and their 1,100 or so wards cost the state around $300 million annually as of 2011. The state has steadily shifted the less hard-core youths to county facilities while offering the counties financial support to take them. The state had approximately 10,000 youths under its control in 1996. Most of those now in the juvenile justice system are of a more hardened variety than the hubcap-stealing youngsters of a bygone era.

Because it costs more than three times as much to house a juvenile offender (around $175,000 annually) than an adult in state prison, state budget reductions in 2011 could have a significant effect on youthful offenders. Counties are being pressured to pay the state $125,000 for each juvenile offender it wants the state to continue housing, otherwise they would be compelled to take the youth into their system.

“This forces counties to take dangerous kids back into counties where there are no secure facilities,” according to David Steinhart, director of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program in Marin County. “And in the future, if it costs too much to put them in the state (juvenile) system, they are going to be prosecuted as adults. The real downside of this penalty is that it will push hundreds of young people into adult prisons.”

Corrections Reorganization in California: What Benefits Can We Expect for Youth Corrections and Juvenile Justice? (by David Steinhart in testimony for the Little Hoover Commission) (pdf)

Juvenile Justice Reform: Realigning Responsibilities (Little Hoover Commission) (pdf)

Getting the State Out of Juvenile Justice (by Executive Director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice Daniel Macallair, Los Angeles Times op-ed)

Juvenile Offenders: Cuts Put Counties on the Spot (by Marisa Lagos, San Francisco Chronicle)

CA Reduces Prison Population by Thousands, Almost Meets Supreme Court Target (by Marisa Lagos, San Francisco Chronicle)

3-Year Budget (pdf)

Medical Care for Prisoners

In the run up to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in May 2011 that California must drastically reduce its prison population, a series of scandalous controversies engulfed the Corrections department. None was more horrific than that involving the prison medical system. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson appointed Robert Sillen to take control of the $1.5 billion medical care system. Sillen’s first report called the CDCR’s medical services “broken beyond repair” including but not limited to “medical records, pharmacy, information technology, peer review, training, chronic disease care, and specialty services.”

He said the care failed to meet constitutional standards of decency. The report also included examples of waste of taxpayer resources involving “purchasing equipment that has never been used, contracting out services at much higher costs, the lack of any pharmacy system, filling in with contract medical and pharmacist providers who charge a much higher hourly rate than CDCR employees (even if they were paid wages that could attract and retain them, according to the receiver).”

The report concluded: “It is important to emphasize that no real taxpayer savings result from the intolerably low salaries of prison health care employees. Instead, according to recent audits, the cost of compensation simply shifted from State employees to the private providers.” In a subsequent report, he told the judge, “The crisis in California's prisons was created over the past several decades as a result of political expediency, incompetence and the creation of a wasteful custody and healthcare operation devoid of accountability.”

Two years later, Judge Henderson fired Sillen, saying the effort was taking too long and was too confrontational. The judge replaced him with J. Clark Kelso, a lawyer with experience turning around government institutions in crisis. Sillen had clashed with lawyers for inmates, lawmakers and other state officials while demanding that the state dramatically increase spending on prison medical care.

Sillen’s successor, Kelso, set a four-year goal for completing his task and said, “We want to do only those things that are really necessary to bring healthcare services up to a constitutional level.”

One month after Sillen’s firing, the state Office of the Inspector General released a report accusing Sillen of misspending hundreds of thousands of dollars. The report, which found no evidence of fraud, said he authorized $218,790 in overpayments to staff members for benefits such as health insurance and retirement that they already received. In addition to millions spent on consultants and professional services, the report also alleged lavish staff salaries including Sillen's own compensation of $605,468 during the period.

The inspector general also alleged numerous instances where travel and entertainment expenses were improperly reimbursed, including a $740 outing hosted by Sillen at a Sacramento steakhouse. Sillen could not provide an original receipt, a list of guests or the business purpose, the report said. Questions were also raised about $13,000 spent to provide 1,875 tote bags to prison nurses that included the inscription: “Correctional Nursing - excellence begins with caring.”

The inspector general at the time, Matthew Cate, was appointed head of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation two years later.

Prison Medical Care a Major Scandal and Disgrace According to Receiver (by Frank D. Russo, California Progress Report)

State Prison Health Czar Is Fired (by Michael Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times)    

Spending by Prison Care Overseer Questioned (by Tom Chorneau, San Francisco Chronicle)

There Goes the Inspector General

The Office of the Inspector General was created in 1994 and charged with independent oversight of California’s correctional system. Its mission was to safeguard the integrity of the state’s correctional system – in effect, to act as the eyes and ears of the public in overseeing the state’s prisons and juvenile correctional facilities.

But over the years, lawmakers in Sacramento became increasingly critical of what many perceived to be an overly close relationship between OIG and officials at the Department of Corrections, the agency it is supposed to be monitoring.  “You had some pretty bad things going on in CDCR and the inspector general just missed them,” Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, told the Associated Press on May 1, 2011. “Maybe the Inspector General's Office is just overwhelmed.”

Governor Jerry Brown announced his intent to cut the office prior to taking office in 2011 in order to save the state $700,000 – the office already was slated to expire at the end of June 2011. And now two bills have been proposed in the state Senate to finish the job.  Lieu’s SB777 would transfer prison audits to the Bureau of State Audits.  A bill by Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, would eliminate the inspector general position and create a new Office of Independent Correctional Oversight that would pick up many of the remaining functions. It would have a director instead of an inspector general, though it would still report to the governor and require Senate confirmation.

The OIG is perhaps best known in recent years for its scathing reports on parole agents' improper supervision of convicted rapist Phillip Garrido, who was sentenced to life in prison for holding Jaycee Dugard captive in a backyard compound for 18 years, and their failure to send molester John Albert Gardner III back to prison before he could murder two San Diego County teenagers.

Making matters worse, a Senate report released in November 2010 questioned why OIG employees carry guns, take state cars home at night and qualify for early peace officer retirement benefits, even though they rarely exercise police powers. None of the office's investigators had fired a gun or made an arrest in at least five years, the Senate report said. “Most of the work they do is the work of auditors and lawyers. They have desk jobs,” Sen. Hancock said.

Governor Schwarzenegger intended to merge the office into the CDCR as part of the department’s big overhaul in 2004. Instead, he granted it a new authority and gave it a bigger budget. Although the legislation to abolish the office is gaining support among lawmakers, not everyone thinks it’s such a great idea.

Don Specter, director of the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office, said it is important for lawmakers to protect the office's duties and independence. His nonprofit law firm has filed many of the lawsuits alleging poor conditions in California prisons. “It is kind of the only state agency that has been able to get to the bottom of some very serious issues that are not only wrong and illegal, but they've highlighted a lot of areas where the department has wasted a lot of money,” Specter said.

And then, as if preparing for its own demise, the OIG popped up prominently in the news on May 26, 2011, when it announced that computer errors had caused California prison officials to mistakenly release 450 inmates a year earlier with a “high risk for violence” as unsupervised parolees in a program meant to ease overcrowding. An additional 1,000 prisoners with a high risk of committing drug and property crimes were also released, OIG officials said.

Corrections officials disputed the findings of the 34-page report, which does not indicate whether any of the parolees who were improperly classified went on to commit new crimes.

Bills Target California Prisons' Inspector General (by Don Thompson, Associated Press)

Computer Errors Let Violent California Prisoners Go Free (by Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times)

Governor Jerry Brown’s 2011-2012 budget proposed eliminating most of the Office of the Inspector General’s functions except use-of-force and employee discipline oversight of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Oversight of correctional issues would be taken over by the Bureau of State Audits. Medical inspections would be transferred to Office of State Audits and Evaluations. It is estimated that these changes would save $6.4 million in 2011-2012 General Fund expenditures and shed nearly 46 employees.

Reducing State Government (Revised 2011-12 budget supplemental) (pdf)

Prison Overcrowding

No one disputes that California’s prisons have become chronically overcrowded. While 137% of design capacity is considered the bottom line for safely incarcerating a prison population, California had been going along for more than a decade at 200% of capacity.  Governor Schwarzenegger had been working with then-Attorney General Jerry Brown and current CDCR Secretary Cate to overhaul the Corrections Department so that no prisoners would be released early. A significant part of that effort included shifting more inmates to the community level, a process that had already begun when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on May 23, 2011, that California’s overcrowded prison system was a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Indeed, much of the 2004 reorganization of the Department of Corrections was based on reducing the prison population and putting more emphasis on providing inmates with programs and training to help them re-enter society, and make a big dent in the high rate of recidivism that many consider a major factor in the overcrowding.  That was the point of adding “rehabilitation” to the department name. In fact, the state’s prison population has been steadily declining for the past three years because of those very efforts.

According to a Pew Study report published April 13, 2011, more than 40% of ex-cons commit crimes within three years of their release and end up behind bars. About 43% of prisoners released in 2004 were back behind bars by 2007. Wyoming and Oregon had the lowest overall recidivism rates for that period, with rates just below 25%. Minnesota had the highest – more than 61% – while Alaska, California, Illinois, Missouri and Vermont all topped 50%. Seventeen states saw their recidivism rates fall and they climbed in 15 states.

California has also been home to “three-strike” laws and in increase in determinate sentencing recommendations, which have both led to a higher number of incarcerations.

Democrats and Republicans generally agree that overcrowding is a problem. They differ on the root cause, and what to do about it.

Prison Recidivism Rates Remain High (by Greg Bluestein, Associated Press)

The Case for the Ruling

Justice Kennedy, who is from Sacramento and is a former law professor at UC Davis, was apparently so adamant in his majority opinion that he included photographs of inmates in open gymnasium-style rooms, which he described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates.  He then noted that suicide rates in California prisons are 80% higher than the national average. Although it was noted that Governor Schwarzenegger had said in 2006 that conditions amounted to a state of emergency, Kennedy seemed persuaded that the passage of time required a court remedy. “For years the medical and mental health care provided by California's prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners' basic health needs. Needless suffering and death have been the well-documented result. Over the whole course of years during which this litigation has been pending, no other remedies have been found to be sufficient. Efforts to remedy the violation have been frustrated by severe overcrowding in California's prison system. Short term gains in the provision of care have been eroded by the long-term effects of severe and pervasive overcrowding.”

Kennedy cited a former Texas prison director who visited some of California’s prisons and described the conditions there as “appalling,” “inhumane” and unlike any he had seen “in more than 35 years of prison work.”

“California is an extreme case by any measure,” said David C. Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, which submitted a brief urging the justices to uphold the lower court’s order. “This case involves ongoing, undisputed and lethal constitutional violations. We’re not going to see a lot of copycat litigation.”

The Case Against the Ruling

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents against the ruling. It is “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history, Scalia wrote. And Alito added that the “majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”

Later, apparently scoffing at Kennedy, Scalia writes: “It is also worth noting the peculiarity that the vast majority of inmates most generously rewarded by the release order – the 46,000 whose incarceration will be ended – do not form part of any aggrieved class even under the Court's expansive notion of constitutional violation. Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”

Alito was more blunt. He ended his dissent with a chilling warning: “In largely sustaining the decision below, the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California. Before putting public safety at risk, every reasonable precaution should be taken. The decision below should be reversed, and the case should be remanded for this to be done. I fear that today's decision, like prior prisoner release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims. I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see.”

California law enforcement officials agreed and said that trying to squeeze more inmates into already overcrowded county systems would force early releases. “Citizens will pay a real price as crime victims, as thousands of convicted felons will be on the streets with minimal supervision,” Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said. “Many of these ‘early release’ prisoners will commit crimes which would never have occurred had they remained in custody.”

“It's an undue burden …to deal with the state's problems,” said Jerry Gutierrez, chief deputy of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Republican lawmakers said they would oppose Governor Brown’s effort to move more inmates to the local governments, complaining of its reliance on tax increases. Democrats “are looking for any excuse they can to try to have more taxes,” said the leader of the state Senate's GOP minority, Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga.

Dutton said state officials should instead fast-track construction of new prisons and pressure the federal government to take custody of thousands of illegal immigrant felons housed in the state system.

U.S. Supreme Court Orders Massive Inmate Release to Relieve California's Crowded Prisons (by David G. Savage and Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times)

Jeffrey Beard, 2012-2015

Matthew Cate, 2008-2012

James E. Tilton, 2006–2008

Jeanne S. Woodford, 2006–2006 (Acting)

Roderick Q. Hickman, 2005–2006

Jeanne S. Woodford, 2004–2005

Richard Rimmer, 2004–2004 (Acting)

Edward S. Alameida, Jr., 2001–2004

Teresa Rocha, 2001–2001 (Acting)

Steve Cambra, 2000–2001 (Acting)

C. A. “Cal” Terhune, 1997–2000

James H. Gomez, 1991–1997

James Rowland, 1987–1991

Daniel McCarthy, 1983–1987

Ruth Rushen, 1980–1982

Jiro “Jerry” Enomoto, 1976–1980

Raymond Procunier, 1967–1975

Walter Dunbar, 1961–1967

Richard A. McGee, 1944–1961