The Supreme Court has upheld an order by a liberal three-judge panel in San Francisco ordering the release of thousands of California prisoners – potentially up to 46,000. The 5-to-4 ruling in Brown v. Plata was joined in by all four Democratic appointees, and written by swing vote Anthony Kennedy.
In their ruling, the Supreme Court reasoned that since prisons had failed to provide adequate healthcare to some prisoners, and overcrowding in some prisons contributed to prison doctors’ failure to provide adequate healthcare, the state prison system as a whole should be ordered to radically reduce its population of inmates. Prison population levels, it said, posed a “risk” to the health of “sick or mentally ill” prisoners, and caused “the delivery of care in the prisons to fall below the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Congress has passed a law called the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which is designed to keep judges from taking over prison systems in response to violations of the rights of individual prisoners. But the majority of the Supreme Court creatively reinterpreted the law to uphold the lower court’s ruling, which essentially seized control of the entire California prison system.
In dissent, Justice Scalia called the ruling “staggering” and “absurd,” noting that it would lead mostly to the release of perfectly healthy inmates whose constitutional “right” to medical care had not been denied even under the majority’s assumptions. As he noted, “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.”
Justice Scalia also noted “the inevitable murders, robberies, and rapes to be committed by the released inmates.” Felons who committed property crimes are particularly likely to be released or not imprisoned in the first place in order to reduce California’s prison population. Criminal justice expert Kent Scheidegger predicts that vast numbers of people who commit property crimes, such as car thieves, will no longer be imprisoned — so if you live in California, “don’t bother investing much in a car. It will be open season on cars given that car thieves (“nonviolent offenders”) will never go to prison no matter how many times they are caught.”
Justice Scalia noted that the Supreme Court had repeatedly overruled the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for ordering the release of individual prisoners. Now, he lamented, the majority were doing just the opposite in ordering the release of “46,000 happy-go-lucky felons.” He added that “terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts said the ruling clashed with the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s provisions limiting the power of federal judges to order a general release of prisoners simply because some individual prisoners’ rights were violated.
