In February, the State of California secured yet another extension to the date by which it must comply with the U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in its state prisons. Prior to the February 10, 2014 ruling, the deadline for reductions in prison overcrowding was set for April, but in the latest decision, three
According to the study reported in this video, California’s Realignment Initiative is resulting in more auto thefts throughout the state. The study does not suggest building more prisons to house California’s criminals. Instead, the study’s authors propose finding alternative methods to reduce crime.
By Christopher Petrella and Alex Friedmann David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York, writes, “Capitalism never resolves its problems; it simply rearranges them geographically.” The same can be said of California’s almost three-year-old Public Safety Realignment initiative – legislation designed to reduce the Golden State’s prison population,
Passed in 1994, California’s “three strikes” law is the nation’s harshest sentencing law. Designed to imprison for life anyone who commits three violent crimes, the law has inadvertently resulted in the incarceration of a lot relatively harmless people, for a long time and at great public expense.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has been granted a two-year extension to comply with court-ordered inmate population reductions. This order came from the federal, three-judge panel overseeing the case. This extension will alter the manner in which the state of California spends funds on reducing the CDCR’s inmate population. Previously, funding would
By Dan Froomkin There’s a growing national consensus that, as Attorney General Eric Holder stated in August, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” When Holder proceeded to order federal prosecutors to stop triggering mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent drug offenders, that
In 1980 the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had a budget of about $330 million and housed around 25,000 federal inmates. The number certainly wasn’t small, but it was manageable. In the last 30 years, this population has exploded: federal prisoners now number in excess of 219,000, which accounts for the 39% average overcrowding of