Fed judges order Calif. to cut inmate population

A federal judicial panel on Tuesday ordered California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 to improve treatment of ailing and mentally ill inmates.

The three-judge panel ruled that cutting the number of inmates is the only way to bring the system’s medical care up to adequate standards.

“California’s prisons are bursting at the seams and are impossible to manage,” the judges wrote.

They gave the state 45 days to develop a plan to reduce the number of inmates in the 33 adult prisons from about 150,000 to 110,000 over two years.

About 8,000 additional inmates have been sent to prisons in other states, while nearly 10,000 more are in conservation camps and community correctional facilities.

Judges said the billions of dollars the state has spent on prisons has not kept inmates from dying regularly from suicides or medical neglect.

Federal courts previously found the level of care was so poor that it violated inmates’ constitutional rights. Conditions remain so cramped that they are leading to increased violence and speed the transmission of infectious diseases, the judges said.

“The medical and mental health care available to inmates in the California prison system is woefully and constitutionally inadequate, and has been for more than a decade,” the judges wrote in their 184-page order... Read more