SACRAMENTO – The California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR) today announced that it has met an important benchmark to
reduce the state’s prison population.
A Three-Judge Court order, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme
Court, requires CDCR to cut its prison population to 124,000 by June 27, 2012
and ultimately reduce overcrowding by 34,000 inmates. On June 20, the most
recent count, California’s prison inmate population was 121,129. This
achievement is the result of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s public safety
Realignment policy, which ensures that many lower-level offenders are punished
and managed at the local level.
“We are ahead of schedule. We were required to get down
to 124,000 inmates by the end of June and we actually reached that number in
mid-April,” said CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate. “The population drop is
increasing our savings while allowing us to more strongly emphasize
rehabilitation.”
Public safety Realignment (Assembly Bill 109) was
implemented October 1, 2011. Realignment shifts responsibility and funding for
non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders from the State of California to
counties, which can more effectively sanction and rehabilitate offenders.
The reduction of crowding enables other improvements at
CDCR, including a renewed commitment to rehabilitation. CDCR’s overall plans
for the next five years are laid out in “The
Future of California Corrections,” a
blueprint that was released in April. Once implemented, it will save
California billions in spending, end costly federal oversight of inmate medical,
mental health and dental care, and significantly improve the operation of the
state’s prison system.
Under the Three-Judge Court’s prisoner reduction order,
affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2011, the inmate population in
California’s 33 prisons must be no more than:
• 167
percent of design capacity by December 27, 2011(133,016 inmates)
• 155
percent by June 27, 2012 (124,000 inmates)
• 147
percent by December 27, 2012 (117,000 inmates)
• 137.5
percent by June 27, 2013 (110,000 inmates)
Although it is fairly standard for prisons to house two
inmates in a cell, a prison’s design capacity is calculated based on one inmate
per cell, single-level bunks in dormitories, and no beds in places not designed
for housing. Current design capacity in CDCR’s 33 institutions is 79,650.
Realignment enables the State to safely reduce the inmate population as a
percentage of design capacity without either quickly building a number of new
prisons or resorting to early release of inmates.
# # #
Copies of monthly status reports (including the documents
filed for the six-month benchmark), a graph tracking the prison population and
other information are on CDCR’s Three-Judge Court webpage: http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/3_judge_panel_decision.html.
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