"Judges refuse to delay order to release 9,600 California inmates"

The title of this post is the headline of this latest report from California concerning the on-going (and seemingly never-ending) prison litigation. Here are the highlights:

The federal judges who last month ordered Gov. Jerry Brown to release 9,600 state inmates or find another cure to overcrowding refused Wednesday to delay their edict while the governor appeals their cap on the prison population to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The judges' June 20 order, still in effect, requires the Brown administration to begin preparations for freeing inmates immediately unless it has another way to comply with the population limit.

Brown and his lawyers had asked the jurists — U.S. District Judges Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson and 9th Circuit Appeals Justice Stephen Reinhardt — to delay the order to give the state time to take its appeal to the high court. They vowed Wednesday to persist in that effort.

"We will seek a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court," said state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman. She said the state would begin complying with the existing order, but "we look forward to making our case to the Supreme Court justices that no further reduction in the prison population is needed."

In the interim, California authorities must provide a system to identify inmates eligible for early release. State officials told federal judges in a filing late Wednesday that they were doing so but also were "assessing alternatives" to early releases for good behavior and had asked the court's medical overseer for a list of "low-risk elderly" inmates who might be paroled early.

Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said the state also is prepared to continue to send inmates out of state, though the Legislature has not acted on a request for $300 million to fund those transfers. Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) has said he does not intend to take up that proposal.

In its request for a stay, the state contended that enacting the judges' requirement that inmates receive increased good-behavior credits to shorten their prison terms would result in changes that "cannot be stopped or undone," at a risk to public safety.

Lawyers representing inmates in the two class-action lawsuits underlying the release order countered that to do nothing would "prolong ongoing irreparable harm — including illness and death" among the 132,000 prisoners they represent. The lawsuits assert that overcrowding results in constitutionally inadequate care for inmates.

In rejecting Brown's request for more time Wednesday, the judges noted that California has been under the population reduction order for four years and said the state had a "long history of ... noncompliance."...

Inmates' lawyers said they doubted the Supreme Court would grant Brown a stay. "The Court has laid to rest every argument that Governor Brown has for not promptly reducing the prison population to constitutionally acceptable levels so that prisoners can get adequate healthcare," said Don Specter, lead attorney for the Prison Law Office, representing inmates in the core medical care lawsuit.

Although California is weeks away from opening its 34th prison, a medical facility near Stockton, officials have not taken other steps to reduce crowding beyond Brown's "realignment" program. That policy took effect in late 2011, requiring counties to house low-level felons and parole violators who otherwise would have been sent to state prisons.

A few recent related posts:

• Federal judges issue new prisoner release order to force California to comply with prior orders
• "Looking Past the Hype: 10 Questions Everyone Should Ask About California's Prison Realignment"
• Talk of reforming prison realignment in California
• Do recent California prison reforms demonstrate Plata ruling was a success or a failure?
• Gov Brown bringing California prison fight back to SCOTUS