WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
Monday’s ruling in the case, Brown v. Plata, No. 09-1233, affirmed an order by a special three-judge federal court requiring state officials to reduce the prison population to 110,000, which is 137.5 percent of the system’s capacity. There have been more than 160,000 inmates in the system in recent years, and there are now more than 140,000.
Prison release orders are rare and hard to obtain, and even advocates for prisoners’ rights said Monday’s decision was unlikely to have a significant impact around the nation.
“California is an extreme case by any measure,” said David C. Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, which submitted a brief urging the justices to uphold the lower court’s order. “This case involves ongoing, undisputed and lethal constitutional violations. We’re not going to see a lot of copycat litigation.”
State officials in California will have two years to comply with the order, and they may ask for more time. Justice Kennedy emphasized that the reduction in population need not be achieved solely by releasing prisoners early. Among the other possibilities, he said, are new construction, transfers out of state and using county facilities.
At the same time, Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was “no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,” in light of the state’s financial problems.
The court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joined Justice Kennedy’s opinion.
The special court’s decision, issued in 2009, addressed two consolidated class-action suits, one filed in 1990, the other in 2001. In 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor, said conditions in the state’s prisons amounted to a state of emergency.
The majority seemed persuaded that the passage of time required the courts to act.
Justice Scalia summarized his dissent, which was pungent and combative, from the bench. Oral dissents are rare; this was the second of the term. Justice Kennedy looked straight ahead as his colleague spoke, his face frozen in a grim expression.
The decision was the fourth 5-to-4 decision of the term so far. All four of them have found the court’s more liberal members on one side and its more conservative members on the other, with Justice Kennedy’s swing vote the conclusive one. In the first three cases, Justice Kennedy sided with the conservatives.
On Monday, he went the other way. This was in some ways unsurprising: in his opinions and in speeches, Justice Kennedy has long been critical of what he views as excessively long and harsh sentences.
“A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society,” Justice Kennedy wrote on Monday.
In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that the majority opinion was an example of the problem of courts’ overstepping their constitutional authority and institutional expertise in issuing “structural injunctions” in “institutional-reform litigation” rather than addressing legal violations one by one.
He added that the prisoners receiving inadequate care were not necessarily the ones who would be released early.
“Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness,” Justice Scalia wrote, “and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”
In his statement from the bench, Justice Scalia said that the prisoners to be released “are just 46,000 happy-go-lucky felons fortunate enough to be selected.” (The justices used varying numbers in describing the number of affected prisoners. California’s prison population has been declining.)
Justice Kennedy concluded his majority opinion by saying that the lower court should be flexible in considering how to carry out its order.
Justice Scalia called this concluding part of the majority opinion “a bizarre coda” setting forth “a deliberately ambiguous set of suggestions on how to modify the injunction.”
“Perhaps,” he went on, “the coda is nothing more than a ceremonial washing of the hands — making it clear for all to see, that if the terrible things sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order do happen, they will be none of this court’s responsibility. After all, did we not want, and indeed even suggest, something better?”
Justice Clarence Thomas joined Justice Scalia’s dissent.
In a second dissent, Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., addressed what he said would be the inevitable impact of the majority decision on public safety in California.
He summarized the decision this way, adding italics for emphasis: “The three-judge court ordered the premature release of approximately 46,000 criminals — the equivalent of three Army divisions.”
Justice Alito acknowledged that “particular prisoners received shockingly deficient medical care.” But, he added, “such anecdotal evidence cannot be given undue weight” in light of the sheer size of California’s prison system, which was at its height “larger than that of many medium-sized cities” like Bridgeport, Conn.; Eugene, Ore.; and Savannah, Ga.
“I fear that today’s decision, like prior prisoner-release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims,” Justice Alito wrote. “I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see.”
Three photographs are part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in which the Supreme Court orders California to release more than 30,000 inmates from state prisons to reduce dangerous overcrowding. Looking at the photos, there should be no doubt that the conditions violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In the first two, men are packed into what looks like a makeshift shelter, with just a few guards monitoring as many as 200 prisoners. The third photo shows man-sized cages in which prisoners needing mental health treatment are held until a bed opens up. One inmate, Justice Kennedy writes, was found standing “in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic.” The state has two years to reduce the overcrowding. Whatever means it chooses, it needs to rethink laws and policies that keep a large number of people in prison for technical parole violations and others for minor, nonviolent crimes. Its limited prison space should be used for people who truly pose a threat to society. The case, Brown v. Plata, grows out of two class-action lawsuits, one started in 1990 by seriously mentally ill prisoners, the other in 2001 by prisoners with serious medical conditions. In 2009, a panel of three federal judges ordered California to reduce its prison population to 110,000 from 156,000 (today there are more than 140,000). The system’s official capacity is 80,000. In their ruling, the panel noted that 12 years after the first suit was brought — and despite 70 court orders for remedies — conditions had continued to deteriorate horribly. A special master appointed by the panel studied suicides in California prisons and found the rate was almost twice as high as the national average for prisons. Almost three-fourths of the suicides were “probably foreseeable or preventable” because they involved “some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention.” California challenged the panel’s ruling in the Supreme Court — especially the need for a limit on the size of the prison population. In Monday’s ruling, Justice Kennedy affirmed the panel’s finding that overcrowding is the “primary cause” of “severe and unlawful mistreatment of prisoners through grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care,” leading to “needless suffering and death.” In separate dissents, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. attack the court’s decision in terms so extreme they call for an answer. Justice Scalia accuses the majority of affirming “what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito warns that the majority makes a “dangerous error” in relying on the three-judge court’s finding that a large release of prisoners will not jeopardize public safety. In fact, Justice Kennedy’s opinion is attentive to safety: California can give early release only to prisoners posing the least risk; it can divert low-risk offenders to community programs; and so on. And he bends over backward to let California decide how to solve the problem. The state retains the choice of how to reduce the overcrowding, through parole reform, construction of new prisons and otherwise. It can propose remedies not yet considered and ask the three-judge court for additional flexibility in using them. But as Justice Kennedy reminds, if the Supreme Court did not impose a limit on California’s prison population, there would be an “unacceptable risk” of continuing violations “with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.” And that would defy the Constitution.