Yesterday, a three judge panel in California ruled that the Department of Corrections must release 40,591 prisoners from the system due to substandard medical and mental health care and severely overcrowded conditions.

California's prison system is operating at 190 percent of its designed capacity. Take a look at the numbers:

167,000: Number of current inmates, including fire camps and out-of-state prisoners

150,354: Inmates currently held in state's 33 prisons

79,824: Design capacity of prisons

40,591: Judges' ordered reduction

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Secretary Matthew Cate shot back with this on the decision: “We believe the federal courts are exceeding their authority under the Prison Litigation Reform Act and will continue to fight against a population cap or court-ordered early release. We will appeal to the United States Supreme Court any final ruling that would order the release of 40,000 inmates. The governor has proposed common sense reforms in collaboration with public safety groups to address overcrowding without early release.”

The state has 45 days to come up with a plan to reduce overcrowding.  

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said the state would comply with the order to produce a plan, but said he doubts the U.S. Supreme Court, to which state officials could appeal any release order, would find that current prison conditions violate the Constitution.

"The courts are ordering the state to come up with a plan to release all these prisoners, but the question is: Which prisoners? Release to what -- halfway houses, GPS monitoring? And what happens when they commit another crime -- do they come back? There's a lot that is not clear," Brown said.

Here are two excerpts from the 184 page order released on 8/4/09 related to the two primary issues around the decision.

 Re: Medical & mental health care

Tragically, California’s inmates have long been denied even that minimal level of medical and mental health care, with consequences that have been serious, and often fatal. Inmates are forced to wait months or years for medically necessary appointments and examinations, and many receive inadequate medical care in substandard facilities that lack the medical equipment required to conduct routine examinations or afford essential medical treatment. Seriously mentally ill inmates languish in horrific conditions without access to necessary mental health care, raising the acuity of mental illness throughout the system and increasing the risk of inmate suicide. A significant number of inmates have died as a result of the state’s failure to provide constitutionally adequate medical care. As of mid-2005, a California inmate was dying needlessly every six or seven days.

Re: Overcrowding 

Since reaching an all-time population record of more than 160,000 in October 2006, the state’s adult prison institutions have operated at almost double their intended capacity. As Governor Schwarzenegger observed in declaring a prison state of emergency that continues to this day, this creates “conditions of extreme peril” that threaten “the health and safety of the men and women who work inside [severely overcrowded] prisons and the inmates housed in them . . . .” Ex. P1 at 1, 8. Thousands of prisoners are assigned to “bad beds,” such as triple-bunked beds placed in gymnasiums or day rooms, and some institutions have populations approaching 300% of their intended capacity. In these overcrowded conditions, inmate-on-inmate violence is almost impossible to prevent, infectious diseases spread more easily, and lockdowns are sometimes the only means by which to maintain control. In short, California’s prisons are bursting at the seams and are impossible to manage.

With California facing the worst budget crisis in the history of the state, and the fact that any solution will require a significant amount of money, state officials are clearly between a rock and a hard place. Victim's rights advocates are already up in arms as well.

California needs a new motto, because it's clearly not the Golden State anymore.