Brown v. Plata and Prison Population Controls

On Monday the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Plata, holding that systemic failures to provide adequate medical and mental health care in the California prison system can only be remedied through judicially-imposed limits on the state’s prison population. In a 5–4 decision, the Court upheld a lower court order requiring California to reduce its prison population to 137.5% of its design capacity within two years. That’s a reduction from about 150,000 inmates to 110,000. In other words, California has been ordered to shed roughly the equivalent of North Carolina’s entire prison system. The case is the climax (though probably not the culmination) of two decades of litigation. First filed in 1990 by a class of seriously mentally ill inmates, the case has seen multiple court-ordered remedial plans, injunctions, the appointment of a special master and a receiver, and—eventually—the empanelment of a three-judge court, empowered under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) to order reductions in the prison population. After hearing 14 days of testimony the court did just that, issuing the population-reduction order described above. The order does not require the state to meet the 137.5% target in any particular way, but everyone seems to agree that there is “no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis.” Slip op. at 30. So, some type of inmate release or transfer will be required. An order to reduce prison population is an extraordinary remedy, and several preliminary hurdles must be cleared [...]