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On Tuesday, judges on a Federal court panel ordered California state officials to lower their prison population by 40,000 within two years. The judges have given California 45 days to devise a plan on how to trim prisoners from its 33 adult prisons. Suggestions have been made to rearrange parole practices, transfer prisoners to rehabilitation programs or county jails, as well as grant early releases based on good behavior. The drastic measures are in response to a health care system that has been deemed inhumane, and found to result in unnecessary deaths of prisoners, to the tune of one prisoner death a week. The overpopulation of California\u2019s prisons has been found to be a leading cause of inadequate health and mental care while also in violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Don Specter, a lawyer and leading advocate for prisoners stated that the court rulings can \u201cfinally fix the horrible problems caused by overcrowding, and do so in a way that will not harm public safety but will make us all safer.\u201d The ruling has been met with some opposition, particularly from Republicans who approved of a major cut in prison spending but vehemently opposed any prisoner releases during the recent state budget battle. Currently, California\u2019s adult prisons operate at 188% of capacity with 158,000 inmates housed in facilities built for about 80,000. <\/p>\n
GUEST: Rebecca Evenson, Senior Staff Attorney with the Prison Law Office<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" | the entire program On Tuesday, judges on a Federal court panel ordered California state officials to lower their prison population by 40,000 within two years. The judges have given California 45 days to devise a plan on how to trim prisoners from its 33 adult prisons. Suggestions have been made to rearrange parole practices, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9288","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=9288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}