According to the New York Times, 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. 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.’ Three years later, the population is down by 23,500 — mostly accomplished by transferring prisoners to private and out-of-state prisons and county jails — and the state has won a series of postponements on the deadline. State Attorney General Kamala Harris is on record as saying that the war on drugs is a failure. Yes, well, that’s a good question, although it does not address the issue of appalling conditions suffered by many prisoners, most particularly the mentally ill, who are often placed in solitary confinement, which drives people mad. Lawyers for the prisoners commented: Defendants baldly assert that if the labor pool for their garage, garbage, and city park crews is reduced, then 'CDCR (the Department of Corrections) would be forced to draw-down its fire camp population to fill these vital MSF (Minimum Support Facility) positions.’ Sure, they have rights; we just can’t remember what they are right now, and ooh, wait: high fire danger due to drought. “The way that argument played out in court does not reflect my priorities,” she said, adding that she fears that state lawyers taking that position will create more distrust in the criminal justice system. Harris worried that heavily policed communities may suspect that the state has an “ulterior motive,” especially when it seems that “the penalty may not be proportionate to the crime.” These are not murderers and rapists; these are nonviolent offenders who should be eligible for parole, who are nevertheless kept around because we need their prison-hardened bodies to do our scut work.
Comment on Our continuing search for cheap labor
By Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle: Entertainment
Wed, 11/26/2014 - 8:53pm
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