Supreme court backs order that California reduce prison crowding

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Supreme Court refused on Friday to excuse California from a lower-court order demanding that the nation's largest state prison system reduce its inmate population by about 10,000 convicts this year to ease crowding.

The state's petition to the high court, denied by the majority without comment, said conditions had improved in the 33-prison system in recent years despite federal court rulings that overcrowding caused problems with mental health and medical care for inmates.

California's request for a stay was the latest move in a dispute between Governor Jerry Brown and a panel of three federal judges over conditions in a state prison system that has also been plagued by hunger strikes and occasional violence.

There was no immediate comment or reaction from either the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or from the Brown or state Attorney General Kamala Harris' offices.

State officials have said California already has made substantial progress in easing crowded prison conditions.

Tens of thousands of low-risk inmates are being diverted from state prisons to the local authorities. Credits for good behavior for certain classes of inmates have been expanded to allow earlier releases.

As a result, the state says, the corrections department no longer has to keep overflow inmates in gymnasiums and day rooms, but has returned those facilities to their intended purposes.

The state's filing requested a stay of a recent order by a panel of federal judges to bring prisons to 137.5 percent of capacity this year - an order that would require California to either find new facilities for about 10,000 inmates or let them go.

As of January, California's prisons held about 119,200 inmates, roughly 50 percent more than they were meant to house. In 2009, after years of litigation, a panel of three federal judges had ruled that the institutions can hold more inmates than they were built to house, but set a specific cap.

Increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of the state's response, the three judges, Stephen Reinhardt, Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson, have twice threatened Brown with contempt of court. In 2011, the Supreme Court backed up the federal judges, saying the state had to reduce crowding.

The state petitioned the Supreme Court again in July to intervene, but on Friday a majority of the justices denied the request without giving an explanation. There was no official public vote, but three of the court's nine justices, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, went on record in favor of a stay.

(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman; additional reporting by David Ingram in Washington and Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and David Gregorio)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-declines-halt-order-reduce-california-prison-194534061.html

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