Listen to the entire program<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n![\"prisons\"](\"http:\/\/i.usatoday.net\/news\/_photos\/2011\/05\/24\/Supreme-court-prisons-6K4QF07-x-large.jpg\")
In a 5-4 ruling the United States Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court’s decision mandating action from the state of California to reduce state prison overcrowding. That previous decision by a three-judge court required the State to “[decrease] its prison population to 137.5% of design capacity within two years.” The state can achieve the required result through a number of measures: building more prisons, moving prisoners from state to county facilities, and releasing inmates. California’s state prison system is designed to hold just under 80,000 individuals. It currently houses about 143,000 prisoners, down from a recent high of 165,000 – about twice the intended capacity. The Supreme Court case was 20 years in the making, and encompassed the consolidated complaints of two class action suits. Filed in 1990, Colman v. Brown held that mentally-ill prisoners did not receive adequate care. Plata v. Brown, filed in 2001, held that inadequate access to medical treatment violated prisoners’ 8th amendment right prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Together the Plaintiffs argued that reducing overcrowding would be the only effective remedy for the violations. The plaintiffs cited numerous problems resulting from overcrowding including 50-odd inmates forced to share 1 toilet, waiting lists to see a doctor up to 700 prisoners long, and mentally-ill prisoners held in telephone-booth sized cages. The Supreme Court gave the state of California two weeks to submit a plan for reaching the required population target in two years. <\/p>\n
GUEST: Ruthie Gilmore, Professor of Geography at CUNY Graduate Center, co-founder of Critical Resistance, author of Golden Gulag<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a 5-4 ruling the United States Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court’s decision mandating action from the state of California to reduce state prison overcrowding. That previous decision by a three-judge court required the State to “[decrease] its prison population to 137.5% of design capacity within two years.” The state can achieve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}