California has led the way to both tremendous wealth, and more recently, bankruptcy. Now, with the assistance of a United States Supreme Court ruling, California will lead the way with the largest number of state convicted felons released in history. Speaking for the majority in a 5-4 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy said: "California prisons have fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements" because of overcrowding.Of course it was the then-majority liberal Justices, led by former Court Guru William Brennan, which made several decisions which determined what kind of treatment was constitutional in the first place. Overcrowding and "insufficient" medical treatment were the great bete noir for the prior Justices, basing their decisions on conditions that they had never experienced or observed. They got their information from leftist ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers who wanted prison cells to look like their homes, and medical treatment to be better than civilian private insurance could provide.
Dissenting, Justice Antonin Scalia was very pointed, calling the ruling "staggering and absurd." He added that the ruling will result in the release of "46,000 happy-go-lucky felons," even though the High Court had overruled several very similar decisions from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the recent past. Justice Clarence Thomas joined in Scalia's dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito wrote a joint separate dissent arguing that the ruling was inconsistent with their own prior rulings limiting federal interference in state incarceration matters based on recent federal legislation.
This will be a brief summary of how California will be affected, but there are already cases pending in several other jurisdictions, and you can make book on the fact that this decision will result in similar litigation in nearly every state of the union. Justice Scalia based his "happy go lucky felons" number on a slightly out-of-date California prison population. California had already begun reducing its prison population high of 160,000 by modifying its parole laws, farming prisoners out to other state corrections facilities and local halfway houses, and building new facilities while adding medical staff. That action had slowed as a result of California's huge budget deficit, but the action was already in the works long before the Supreme Court ruled. The actual number of felons to be released is currently more like 42,000 than 46,000, but that's close enough.
It has been estimated that the number of felons to be placed in programs other than full release was close to 35,000 over a two-year period. This program had the support of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, current Governor Jerry Brown, the State Department of Corrections, and the state legislature. The out-of-state incarceration program was to be ended because it was costing too much, but the state will now have to re-evaluate that decision, even though it has no money to pay for the program. None of this was good enough for Justice Kennedy and the four liberal bleeding-hearts on the High Court. They were unclear on whether the 35,000 prisoners in the California plans overlapped with the 42,000 they have ordered released.
Prison is a very unpleasant experience. Is it intended to be otherwise? It is, in the minds of insulated Justices living in mansions in Georgetown, Arlington and other D.C. locations. "Cruel and unusual" punishment is in the eye of the beholder, in this case the Supreme Court. You wouldn't allow your children to live in conditions like this, but then maybe you've taught them not to be criminals. As for overcrowding, they never saw my frat house in Berkeley. Medical care in the state prisons is on a par with the British National Health Service, without the death panels. It's not very good, but it's not medieval either. And the Brits don't even think it's cruel. Naturally, there have been gross violations of standard care from time to time, but no worse than in the general civilian population.
When the prisoners get back into the civilian population, they will be enjoying the benefits of reduced police, law enforcement personnel, and parole supervisors to greet them as a result of budget cuts. No problem, say the liberals. Serious crime is down, after all. They fail to see the connection between strict law enforcement, imprisonment, and three-strikes laws as the major cause of reduction in crime. They are likely to see a concomitant increase in serious crime statewide as a result of the Supreme Court ordered prisoner releases.
The left has been attacking the California three-strikes laws as if bicycle thieves and drug-users are the ones filling the state's prison facilities. Nonsense. There are multiple escape valves available to the courts, prosecutors and law enforcement officials for minor, non-violent criminals to avoid lifetime incarceration. Those filling the prisons are recidivists, and the vast majority are repeat violent offenders.
Which brings me to another topic. From liberals to conservatives, polls and studies show that somewhere between 29% and 31% of California's prisoners are illegal immigrants. If you take the lowest estimate of the state prison population (+ 130,00) and multiply it by the lowest percentage of estimated illegals in those prisons, you get approximately 37,700. You could get pretty close to solving the Supreme Court's problems with California prison populations by releasing all the illegals, putting them on flotillas of jumbo jets, giving them parachutes, and dropping them over Mexico City. But I digress.
Even genuine conservative writers have taken on the topic and concluded that the prisons are overcrowded and medical care inadequate. At TownHall.com, Steve Chapman penned an article entitled: "When Punishment is a Crime." But he makes the mistake of the liberals. He sees nasty conditions in California prisons as being equal to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. That's over-the-top and fails to recognize the actions which were already being taken by two California administrations. And like too many decent, hard-working, law-abiding citizens, he fails to recognize that prison conditions will never be anything like what he considers minimal civilian standards. He simply doesn't have the experience to know that most of these violent felons are living a better, even safer life than they ever lived on the outside.
Living the thug life on the mean streets of Oakland and South Central Los Angeles is far more dangerous than being in a state prison. Notice I didn't say it was "safe." I said it was safer. Likewise, prison medical care is at least as good as what the imprisoned felon would have gotten as a free man using Med-Cal/MedicAid. It is simply ridiculous to compare prison conditions to life on the outside and decide that the conditions on the inside are unnecessarily cruel and unusual. If prison conditions are at all unusual, it is because those who chose to commit violent crimes are likewise unusual. If the treatment seems cruel, it's largely because "please" and "thank you" don't work very well when you want a hardened criminal do do something, or more likely, to stop doing something.
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