UPDATE Tuesday, May 24, 5:01pm | Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske is authoring a council agenda item asking the city manager and the chief of police to assess and present to the Long Beach City Council what the city can do to begin preparing for a probable influx of paroled felons that will be released early from prison following Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on California’s overcrowded prison system.
The nation’s high court ruled in a split 5-4 decision that prisons within the state corrections system are so overcrowded that “needless suffering and death” are occurring and that the prisons have “fallen short of the minimum constitutional requirements.”
Schipske announced her plans to draw up the agenda item in a Tuesday morning e-mail.
“Many (prisoners released early) will be sent to county jail, others sent to community halfway houses and others simply released,” Schipske wrote. “We need to know what additional budgeting is required for public safety to deal with this new development.”
Monday, May 23, 4:05pm | The United States Supreme Court issued a ruling Monday regarding California’s overcrowded prisons, ordering the state corrections system to release 30,000-plus prisoners.
How many of those inmates ordered released are returning to Long Beach was not immediately known.
The decision divided the nation’s high court, with four justices dissenting in two separate non-majority opinions.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who authored the majority’s opinion, said California’s prisons are so overcrowded that they cause “needless suffering and death.” This, he said, illustrates that the California Department of Corrections has “fallen short of the minimum constitutional requirements” that apply under the Eighth Amendment, which bars the use of cruel and unusual punishment.
Prisoners’ living conditions, the majority found, are ,” and therefore fall under the category of cruel and unusual punishment.
The majority found that prisoners’ living conditions are “below standards of decency” in California. Kennedy wrote that at some state prisons, as many as 200 inmates may live in a gymnasium rather than separate holding cells and that up to 54 inmates must share the same toilet.
The decision upheld a decision formulated by a three-judge panel in California setting a maximum capacity limit and ordering the state to release between 38,000 and 46,000 prisoners to meet that ceiling.
The most recent tally of inmates in California prisons was 142,000, according to the state, leaving the statewide prison population at about 32,000 over the 110,000 limit.
Kennedy said that the state’s only option is to release tens of thousands of prisoners. However, more time is being granted for the state to execute the release; Kennedy noted that the panel should “accord the state considerable latitude to find mechanisms and make plans consistent with the public safety.”
The decision represents one of the largest inmate release orders in American history, one that dissenters labeled “the most radical injunction in U.S. history.”
It has yet to be determined how exactly the early paroling of roughly 32,000 inmates might impact the city of Long Beach. The overall effect will hinge upon the number of parolees returning to the community as well as their criminal backgrounds. Most, if not all, of those to be released early would be nonviolent offenders, the state has said.
Parolees by law must return to the communities in which they were living prior to going to prison. Based on the state’s shoddy track record of having one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation, it would not be unreasonable to assume that crime rates statewide might spike.