Everything Revolves Around Overcrowding:
The State of California’s Prisons

I.  Introduction

Donald
Specter
Director,
Prison Law Office,
Berkeley, California

California has the nation’s largest and the world’s thirdlargest prison system.1 In two separate class action
lawsuits, filed a decade apart, California prisoners sued
the governor and corrections officials for violating their
rights under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual
Punishment Clause because they were being deprived of
adequate health care. In the first case, Coleman v. Wilson,
the federal court in 1995 held after a three-month trial
“that thousands of inmates suffering from mental illness
are either undetected, untreated, or both.”2 In the second
case, Plata v. Davis, the state of California in 2002 implicitly acknowledged that it had been deliberately indifferent
to the medical care needs of prisoners and stipulated to an
injunction designed to improve medical care throughout
the state’s thirty-three prisons.3 The common thread in
both cases is that prisoners’ basic health care needs were
not being met, resulting in injury or death from neglect,
suicide, or malpractice at an alarming rate.
Three years after stipulating to the injunction in Plata,
the court put California’s prison medical system into receivership because it remained “broken beyond repair” and
the state had proved utterly incapable of fixing the system.4
At that time, the court noted that
[t]he harm already done in this case to California’s
prison inmate population could not be more grave,
and the threat of future injury and death is virtually
guaranteed in the absence of drastic action. . . .
Indeed, it is an uncontested fact that, on average, an
inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies
every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the CDCR’s medical delivery system. This
statistic, awful as it is, barely provides a window into
the waste of human life occurring behind California’s
prison walls due to the gross failures of the medical
delivery system. Plata, 2005 WL 2932253, at *1.
Nearly five years after the Plata court placed California’s prisons in partial receivership and after the Coleman
court issued more than seventy additional orders to
improve mental health care, 5 California’s prisoners
remain at serious risk of injury or death because medical
and mental health care remain abysmal. There is one

primary reason why neither the state nor the receiver has
been able to improve prison health care—overcrowding.
II.  Overcrowding in California’s Prisons

Severe overcrowding makes the safe operation of a prison
system nearly impossible. “Everything revolves around
overcrowding. The deficiencies in the classification plan,
the deficiencies in the unavailability of staff because they
are doing other tasks associated with overcrowding problems to do onsite medical appointments or offsite medical
appointments, the wear and tear on the infrastructure.”6
The level of overcrowding in California’s prisons is
unprecedented. California’s prison system incarcerates
approximately 155,500 men and women in thirty-three prisons that were designed to house roughly half that many.7 In
recent times, some converted and triple-bunked gymnasiums have approached 300 percent of their capacity.8 There
is near unanimity among correctional experts, California
prison administrators, the correctional officers’ union, the
Governor of California, and various commissions that have
studied the situation over the last two decades that this level
of overcrowding causes serious and at times deadly harm to
prisoners, prison staff, and the public.9
Current and former heads of corrections from other
states have been shocked at the conditions.10 The former
director of the next-largest state prison system, in Texas,
said that “[i]n more than 35 years of prison work experience, I have never seen anything like it.”11 This observation
includes the time when all of Texas’s prisons were condemned by a federal court for overcrowding.12
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recognized the
dangers overcrowding poses to prisoners, prison staff, and
the public. In October 2006, the Governor proclaimed a
prison overcrowding state of emergency.13 In that proclamation, the Governor accurately described what the court
would find two and a half years later—that overcrowding in
California’s prison system “has caused substantial risk to the
health and safety of the men and women who work inside
these prisons and the inmates housed in them,” making
prisons places of “extreme peril to the safety of persons.”14
He found that overcrowding creates “an increased, substantial risk of violence” and “an increased substantial risk for
transmission of infectious illnesses,” and that “tight quarters

Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 194–199, ISSN 1053-9867 electronic ISSN 1533-8363.
©2010 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. Please direct requests for permission to photocopy
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create line-of-sight problems for correctional officers by
blocking views, creating an increased, substantial security
risk.”15 The Governor declared that “immediate action is
necessary to prevent death and harm caused by California’s
severe prison overcrowding.”16
These risks are not theoretical. In one instance, a dormitory was so crowded that prison staff did not learn
about a prisoner’s death for hours, much less provide
emergency care.17
Last year, a riot broke out in a state prison near Los
Angeles.18 Hundreds of prisoners were injured, some critically, and millions of dollars in damage was caused
by the fire that destroyed several buildings.19 After touring
the scene, Governor Schwarzenegger was clear about the
reason for the disturbance. The riot, he explained, was “a
terrible symptom of a much larger problem, a much
larger illness. The reality is that California’s entire prison
system is in a state of crisis. It is collapsing under its own
weight.”20
III. Litigation Leading to Limits on California’s
Prison Population
A.  Genesis of the Proceedings

The court’s constitutional authority to protect prisoners
from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth
Amendment by capping the prison population and thereby
overriding state sentencing and parole laws is well established.21 That authority was restricted in 1996, when the
Republican-controlled Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA).22 As one might expect, the
so-called reform provisions were designed not to enhance
constitutional protections, but to prevent prisoner litigation against state prison systems through restrictions on
the ability of prisoners to initiate litigation,23 substantive
limits on the injuries subject to compensation,24 and a low
cap on attorney fees.25
In one sense the “reform” intended by the PLRA has
been achieved. Despite the long trend of increasing prison
populations throughout the United States, involuntary
population caps on correctional facilities have been rare.
Indeed, since the PLRA was enacted there have been only
a couple of reported decisions, one of which resulted in a
consent judgment.26
The PLRA permits a court to cap the population of a
prison or jail to alleviate constitutional violations caused
by overcrowding.27 Before a prisoner release order—defined as “any order . . . that has the purpose or effect of
reducing or limiting the prison population, or that directs
the release from or nonadmission of prisoners to a
prison”28 —can be issued, the district court must find by
clear and convincing evidence that overcrowding is the
“primary cause” of the constitutional violation and that no
other relief would be sufficient.29 Before imposing a cap,
the three-judge panel also must “give substantial weight to
any adverse impact on public safety or the operation of a
criminal justice system caused by the relief.”30

Although it was meant to protect state and local governments from judicial interference, the PLRA gave the
courts explicit authority, albeit in very limited situations,
to interfere with the states’ criminal justice systems. By
expressly directing the court to consider public safety concerns when doing so, it embedded the federal courts in
highly sensitive issues that traditionally have been left
largely to the discretion of the states.31
The Supreme Court has made it clear that crowding
itself is not a constitutional violation; instead, prisoners
have to prove that crowding contributes to the deprivation
of a basic human right, such as shelter or personal safety.32
The prototypical overcrowding case involves old dilapidated
prisons or jails, with prisoners sleeping on the floor and/or
living in filthy and violent conditions.33 In California, however, many of the prisons are relatively new, and the
corrections department has largely managed to provide
each prisoner with a bed by triple-bunking prisoners in
gymnasiums and dayrooms and sending thousands to
private, out-of-state prisons.
On the other hand, basic medical and mental health
care for prisoners have been lacking for decades, and have
become less available as the prison population has swelled.
Shortly after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed
the State of Emergency, the plaintiffs in Plata and Coleman
filed simultaneous motions before their respective single
district court judges, seeking the creation of a special threejudge court to determine whether to cap California’s prison
population.34 The theory behind the motions was unique
and untested. In contrast to the usual case where the connection between crowding and violence, for example, is
more intuitive, in these motions the prisoners claimed that
overcrowding was responsible for the state’s decade-long
inability to provide constitutionally adequate medical and
mental health care to prisoners. In Coleman and Plata, the
prisoners maintained that the demand for health care outstripped the ability of the prison system to provide adequate
staff and facilities, and that the sheer number of prisoners
crammed into the state’s thirty-three prisons made doing
so impossible.35
Both Judge Henderson in Plata and Judge Karlton in
Coleman were extremely reluctant to initiate proceedings
that could result in a cap on California’s prison population.
Both judges continued the hearings for six months to
obtain more information and to give the state another
opportunity to solve the overcrowding crisis on its own.36
Six months later, the state had done nothing except to
pass a $7.7 billion bond measure to finance another massive
wave of prison construction that, three years later, has not
resulted in the addition of a single prison cell.37 As the court
later stated, “Although California’s existing prison system
serves neither the public nor the inmates well, the state has
for years been unable or unwilling to implement the
reforms necessary to reverse its continuing deterioration.”38
The court found itself as the only practical mechanism to
achieve the necessary reform: “[W]hen federal court intervention becomes the only means by which to enforce rights

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guaranteed by the Constitution, federal courts are obligated
to act. ‘Without this, all the reservations of particular rights
would amount to nothing.’”39
Left with no choice, and based on the reports of the
receiver in Plata and the Special Master in Coleman and a
lengthy review of the history of both cases, both courts
ordered the creation of a three-judge court.40 The Chief
Judge of the Ninth Circuit consolidated the cases and
assigned Judges Thelton Henderson, Lawrence Karlton,
and Stephen Reinhardt to preside over the proceedings.41
B.  The Three-Judge Court’s Decision

After hearing testimony from nearly fifty witnesses in
fourteen days and sifting through thousands of
documents,42 the court found in a 184-page opinion overwhelming evidence that overcrowding was the primary
cause of the state’s failure to provide constitutionally
acceptable health care to California prisoners.43 It quoted
particularly from the expert report of former acting Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR) Jeanne Woodford: “[O]vercrowding
in the CDCR is extreme, its effects are pervasive and it is
preventing the Department from providing adequate
mental and medical health care to prisoners.”44 “In short,”
the court concluded, “California’s prisons are bursting at
the seams and are impossible to manage.”45
Specifically, the court found that besides adversely
affecting prison administration, crowding created numerous barriers to adequate health care:
Crowding also renders the state incapable of maintaining an adequate staff and an adequate medical
records system. In addition, crowding causes prisons
to rely on lockdowns, which further restrict inmates’
access to care, and it forces prisons to house inmates
in non-traditional settings, such as triple-bunks in
gyms and dayrooms not designed for housing, that
contribute to the lack of care and the spread of infectious disease and that increase the incidence and
severity of mental illness among prisoners. Coleman,
2009 WL 2430820, at *32.
All of these problems “ultimately contribute to unacceptably
high numbers of both preventable or possibly preventable
deaths, including suicides, and extreme departures from
the standard of care.”46
The PLRA required the court to balance such extraordinary and dire circumstances with the potential
consequences to public safety from an order capping the
prison population.47 The three judges were acutely aware
of these concerns and expressed extreme reluctance at the
prospect of interfering so directly in the operation of the
prison system and making policy choices affecting public
safety that usually belong to the state.48 They virtually
begged the parties, and the state in particular, to resolve the
crisis through legislation or settlement, without success.49
Finally, concluding that “California’s prisoners, present
and future, (and the state’s population as a whole) can wait

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no longer,”50 the court set a population cap of 137.5 percent
of design capacity and ordered the state to develop a plan to
make the required reduction of 40,000 prisoners over two
years.51 The state and other parties have appealed that decision to the United States Supreme Court.52
Were the Court forced to choose between reducing the
prison population and increasing crime, the decision
would have been even more difficult. However, that false
dilemma is not present for one simple, yet counterintuitive
reason—crime does not increase when fewer offenders are
punished by incarceration. In fact, most agree that a prison
population reduction, when targeted at low-risk offenders
and accompanied by evidence-based programs in the community, is safer than the status quo.53
The belief that a reduction in the prison population
leads to more crime is not supported by data or the experience in many jurisdictions that have used early release
to reduce their correctional populations. A 2007 study by
the National Council of Crime and Delinquency reviewed
thirteen reports on the early release of prisoners in the
United States and Canada.54 In each case, the crime rates
remained the same or declined during the early-release
period, and the prisoners released early did not commit
more crimes than their counterparts who served the full
sentence.55 In jurisdictions that provided communitybased supportive services, recidivism rates declined.56
Nor is there a change in the crime rate when correctional facilities cap their populations. From 1996 to 2006,
twenty-one California counties released 1.7 million inmates
early because of jail overcrowding.57 During that same
period, the number of reported serious crimes dropped by
18 percent.58 A similar, although less dramatic, reduction in
the crime rate occurred during the most recent three-year
period.59
One reason that there is no direct link between releasing
prisoners and crime is that parolees are not responsible for
as much crime as the public is led to believe. Although featured prominently in media stories about violent crime,
parolees actually contribute very little to the crime rate. A
study by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that
parolees account for less than 5 percent of serious crimes.60
The experience of Fresno County, California, is indicative of the sharp contrast between common myths
about parolees perpetuated by both the media and law
enforcement and the actual data. The police chief of the
City of Fresno, who at the time also was president of the
California Police Chief’s Association, testified that crime
would increase if prisoners were released early. That
prediction was based on his belief that the additional
parolees would “dramatically” increase crime in his
community.61 But the data showed—and the chief
admitted—that despite a 28 percent increase in the
number of parolees from 2003 to 2007, both property
and violent crime dropped during that time.62 The drop
in crime was so significant that it led the chief to boast
on his Web site that Fresno was enjoying the lowest
crime rate in forty-three years.63

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Another reason that incarcerating more offenders does
not always translate into safe streets is that there is no evidence that sentence length affects recidivism.64 The length
of the sentence does not control whether a parolee will
commit another crime and, if so, how many. That may be
why virtually all states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons
release prisoners “early” through some form of sentence
credit to provide incentives for good behavior and to control their prison populations.65
This central point explains why the three-judge panel
concluded that a reduction in the prison population,
through increased credits or other means, would not lead
to more crime:
[A]ll else being equal the likelihood that a person who
is released a few months before his original release
date will reoffend is the same as if he were released
on his original release date. Shortening the length of
stay in prison thus affects only the timing and circumstances of the crime, if any, committed by a
released inmate—i.e., whether it happens a few
months earlier or a few months later. Coleman, 2009
WL 2430820, at *90 (citations omitted).
The court is not alone in concluding that public safety
and a smaller prison population are compatible. Ironically,
at the same time the Governor was fighting to prevent the
court’s ultimate ruling, he was trying to persuade the state
legislature to pass a series of laws that would effectively
achieve nearly the same result.
The Governor proposed measures that would reduce
the prison population by 37,000 over the same two-year
period.66 His administration publicly trumpeted the
reforms, proclaiming that
[t]he best minds in California and the nation have
already provided us with recommendations. Five
years ago, the Deukmejian Commission outlined
ways that we can target resources on higher risk
offenders and reduce costs, without increasing crime
rates. An expert panel convened by the Schwarzenegger Administration has given us a roadmap to
reducing recidivism.67
The proposed reforms—enhancing good time credits,
parole reform, diversion of low-risk offenders, and reducing some property crimes to misdemeanors—were similar
to those that the court found effective and safe.68 The state
legislature passed a watered-down version that ultimately
is expected to reduce the prison population by approximately 11,000 prisoners.69
IV. The State’s Response to the Order Capping
California’s Prison Population

Despite the congruence between the Governor’s policy
and the court’s findings, the battle between the state and
the court continued. Having concluded that overcrowding
presents an extreme danger to prisoners and that the

prison population could be reduced safely, the court reluctantly but firmly ordered the Governor to submit a plan to
reduce the prison population by about 40,000 prisoners
within two years.70 The Governor, however, defied the
court’s order. The plan he submitted called for a population reduction of only about 18,000 prisoners within two
years.71
After the prisoners moved to hold the Governor in civil
and criminal contempt, the court rejected the Governor’s
plan, implied that it would initiate contempt proceedings
absent compliance with its orders, and directed the Governor to submit a plan consistent with its original order.72 The
Governor blinked, perhaps motivated by the threat of contempt, and submitted a responsible plan that provides for
the safe reduction of the prison population by the amount
and within the time required by the court’s order.73
This plan, which the court subsequently approved,74
relies on a mixture of measures that include sentencing
reform, the transfer of prisoners to private out-of-state and
federal immigration facilities, parole reform, community
corrections, and enhanced conduct credits.75 The largest
single reduction (28 percent of the total) would be accomplished by abolishing state prison sentences for seven
drug and property crimes.76
The state’s plan will not go into effect immediately
because the court stayed its order pending the appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, California’s prisons remain extremely overcrowded, with recent reports of
prisoners in at least one prison being confined to large
cages called holding cells for days at time without beds and
toilets. In his first report of the new decade, the federal
receiver for medical care noted that he remained unable to
implement needed reforms because of the excessive prison
population.77
V.  Conclusion

The crux of the problem confronting California’s criminal justice system is that its sentencing and parole laws
imprison more offenders than the state can house safely.
Until the state recognizes that prison is a finite, scarce,
and expensive resource and takes steps to use that resource
efficiently and effectively to produce the maximum safety
to the public, there is little hope that judicial intervention
will end. As Governor Schwarzenegger candidly admitted
earlier in his administration,
I don’t blame the courts for stepping in to try to solve
the health care crisis that we have, the overcrowding
crisis that we have, because the fact of the matter is, for
decades the state of California hasn’t really taken it
seriously. It hasn’t really done something about it.78
Notes
	1	 See Thelton Henderson, Confronting the Crisis of California Prisons, 43 U.S.F. L. Rev. 1, 3 (2008). California topped Texas by
15,000 prisoners as of August 2008. See Offender Information
Services Branch, California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (hereinafter CDCR), Weekly Report of Population as

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of Midnight August 27, 2008 (2008), available at http://www.
cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_
Branch/WeeklyWed/TPOP1A/TPOP1Ad080827.pdf; Tex. Dep’t
of Criminal Justice, Annual Review 2008, at 26 (2008), available
at http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/mediasvc/annualreview2008.pdf.
	2	Coleman v. Wilson, 912 F. Supp. 1282, 1306 (E.D. Cal. 1995).
	3	 Stipulation for Injunctive Relief, Plata v. Schwarzenegger, No.
C01-1351 TEH, 2005 WL 2932253 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 3, 2005).
	4	 Plata, 2005 WL 2932253, at *1.
	5	Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P,
2009 WL 2430820, at *12 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2009) (opinion
and order).
	6	 Id. at *55 (quoting expert testimony of Doyle Wayne Scott)
(internal quotation marks omitted).
	7	 Offender Information Services Branch, CDCR, Weekly Report
of Population as of Midnight December 30, 2009 (2010),
available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/
Offender_Information_Services_Branch/WeeklyWed/
TPOP1A/TPOP1Ad091230.pdf; Coleman, 2009 WL
2430820, at *1.
	8	 Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *1.
	9	 See, e.g., id. at *38–*39, *44–*45.
10	 See photos of overcrowded conditions on the CDCR website
	
at Prison Overcrowding Photos, http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/
News/prisonovercrowding.html (last visited Feb. 24, 2010).
	11	 Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *42 (quoting expert report
of Doyle Wayne Scott) (internal quotation marks omitted).
	12	 See Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp 1265, 1277-88 (S.D. Tex. 1980).
13	Proclamation by the Governor of the State of California, Prison
	
Overcrowding State of Emergency Proclamation, Oct. 4, 2006,
available at http://www.gov.ca.gov/proclamation/4278/.
14	 Id.
	
	15	 Id.
	16	 Id.
	17	Transcript of Proceedings at 382–83, Coleman v.
Schwarzenegger, No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P, 2009 WL
2430820 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2009) (testimony of Jeanne
Woodford).
	18	 See Jackie Castillo, 250 Inmates Hurt, 55 Hospitalized After
California Prison Riot, Cnn.com, Aug. 9, 2009, http://www.cnn.
com/2009/US/08/09/california.prison.riot/index.html.
19	 Id. Visual images of the riot and its aftermath can be found
	
at California’s Overcrowded Prisons, BBC News, Oct. 5, 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_
america/8291916.stm.
20	Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor Tours the Califor	
nia Institution for Men in Chino (Aug. 19, 2009) (transcript
available at http://gov.ca.gov/speech/13023).
	21	 See, e.g., Harris v. Philadelphia, 47 F.3d 1342 (3d Cir. 1995);
Johnson v. Levine, 588 F.2d 1378 (4th Cir. 1978); Campbell v.
McGruder, 580 F.2d 521 (D.C. Cir. 1978); Vazquez v. Carver,
729 F. Supp. 1063 (E.D. Pa. 1989).
	22	Pub. L. No. 104-134 tit. VIII, 110 Stat. 1321-66 to 1321-77
(codified as amended in scattered sections of 11, 18, 28,
and 42 U.S.C.).
	23	 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a), (c) (2006).
	24	 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(e) (2006).
	25	 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(d) (2006).
	26	 See Roberts v. Mahoning County, 495 F. Supp. 2d 719 (N.D.
Ohio 2007).
	27	 18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(3) (2006). The PLRA is applicable to
prisoner federal civil rights cases brought in both state and
federal courts. See, e.g., Baker v. Rolnick, 210 Ariz. 321, 325
(Ariz. Ct. App. 2005) (holding that “the broad yet plain language of [the PLRA] encompasses § 1983 prisoner lawsuits
filed in both state and federal court”); Martin v. Ohio Dep’t of
Rehab. & Corr., 749 N.E. 2d 787, 790 (Ohio Ct. App. 2001)
(construing 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a) to apply to federal civil

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rights cases “whether the claim is brought in federal court or
state court”).
	28	 18 U.S.C. § 3626(g)(4) (2006).
	29	 18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(3)(E) (2006).
	30	 18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(1) (2006).
	31	 See, e.g., Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11, 24–25 (2003)
(emphasizing courts’ traditional deference to states’ sentencing choices); Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 412 (1974),
overruled on other grounds by Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 U.S.
401 (1989) (characterizing the enforcement of criminal law as
one of the primary functions of state governments).
32	Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 347 (1981).
	
33	 See, e.g., Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp. 1265, 1277-82 (D.C.
	
Tex. 1980).
34	Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, No. CIV-S-90-0520 LKK JFM P,
	
2009 WL 2430820, at *24 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2009) (opinion
and order). Under the PLRA, only a three-judge court, composed of two district court judges and one appellate judge,
has the authority to issue an order that has the purpose or
effect of limiting the population of a correctional facility.
18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(3)(B), (g)(4) (2006).
35	 Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *2.
	
36	 Id. at *44.
	
37	Assemb. B. 900 ch. 7, 2007–2008 Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2007);
	
Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *65.
38	 Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *1.
	
39	 Id. at *3 (quoting The Federalist No. 78 (Alexander Hamilton)).
	
	40	 Id. at *27.
41	 Id.
	
42	 Id.
	
43	 Id. at *62.
	
44	 Id. at *34.
	
45	 Id. at *1.
	
46	 Id. at *53.
	
	47	 18 U.S.C. § 3626(a)(1) (2006).
	48	 See Transcript of Proceedings at 3145, Coleman, 2009 WL
2430820 (No. CIV-S-90-0520 LKK JFM P) (“I cannot possibly
convey to you the depth of our reluctance to [order a remedy],
but if you leave us no alternative, we will.” (statement of
Reinhardt, J.)); id. at 3146 (“[W]e will do our duty. That’s what
we are sworn to do, but we do it reluctantly and only when you
have demonstrated that there is nothing else and no other
way to proceed.” (statement of Karlton, J.)).
	49	 See id. at 3142–43.
	50	 Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *3.
51	 Id. at *116.
	
	52	The U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction over appeals from a
three-judge district court. 28 U.S.C. § 1253 (2006). Although
the first appeal was dismissed for want of jurisdiction,
Schwarzenegger v. Plata, No. 09-416, 2010 WL 154851, at
*1 (U.S. Jan. 19, 2010), the State and defendant-intervenors
have filed a subsequent appeal from the three-judge court’s
final order, which was issued on January 12, 2010. If the
Court agrees to hear that appeal, the case will probably be
decided by the end of June 2011.
53
	 	 See Expert Panel on Adult Offender and Recidivism Reduction
Programming, CDCR, Report to the California State Legislature:
A Roadmap for Effective Offender Programming in California
77–79 (2007) (reviewing fifteen reports over the previous seventeen years), available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/2007_
Press_Releases/docs/ExpertPanelRpt.pdf.
54
	 	 Carolina Guzman, Barry Krisberg, & Chris Tsukida, National
Council on Crime and Delinquincy, Accelerated Release: A Literature Review (2008), available at http://nccd-crc.issuelab.
org/sd_clicks/download2/accelerated_release_a_literature_
review_focus.
55
	 	 Id. at 2.
56
	 	 Id.

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	57	Expert Report of Barry Krisberg Ph.D. at 10, Coleman v.
Schwarzenegger, No. CIV-S-90-0520 LKK JFM P, 2009 WL
2430820 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2009) (opinion and order).
	58	 Id.
	59	 Id.
	60	 Patrick A. Langan & David J. Levin, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
U.S. Department of Justice, Recidivism of Prisoners Released in
1994, at tbl.5 (2002), available at http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/
content/pub/pdf/rpr94.pdf.
61	Transcript of Proceedings at 2348, Coleman, 2009 WL
	
2430820 (No. CIV-S-90-0520 LKK JFM P).
	62	Plaintiffs’ Trial Exhibit No. 842, Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820
(No. CIV-S-90-0520 LKK JFM P); Transcript of Proceedings at
2349-51, Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820 (No. CIV-S-90-0520
LKK JFM P).
	63	 Id. Currently, the police chief’s website states that violent
crime is at its lowest point since 1973 and that in 2008, the
property crime rate was the lowest in more than forty years.
City of Fresno, Fresno Police Department, Chief Jerry Dyer,
http://www.fresno.gov/Government/DepartmentDirectory/
Police/default.htm (last visited on Feb. 25, 2010).
64	Expert Panel on Adult Offender and Recidivism Reduction
	
Programming, supra note 57, at 92.
	65	 Id.
	66	 Matthew Cate, Prisons: It’s Time to Reform and Reduce Population, Cap. Wkly., Aug. 13, 2009, available at http://www.
capitolweekly.net/article.php?_c=ybr1t2urmkdejf&xid=y6x62
x72akddqo&done=.ybr1ub1utqweuz.
	67	 Id.
	68	 Id.; Coleman, 2009 WL 2430820, at *87–*99.
	69	 Sen. B. xxx 18 ch. 28 2009–2010 Third Extra. Sess. (Cal.
2009); see CDCR, California to Submit Population Management

Plan that Prioritizes Public Safety and Relieves Overcrowding
(2009), available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/2009_
Press_Releases/Sept_18.html.
70	 Id. at *116.
	
	71	Defendants’ Population Reduction Plan, at ex.A tbl.1, Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P, 2010
WL 99000 (E.D. Cal. Jan. 12, 2010) (order to reduce prison
population), available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/2009_
Press_Releases/docs/Defendants_Pop_Reduction_Plan_wExhibits.pdf.
72	Order Rejecting Defendants’ Population Reduction Plan and
	
Directing the Submission of a Plan That Complies with the
August 4, 2009, Opinion and Order, Coleman, 2010 WL
99000 (No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P).
73	Defendants’ Response to Three-Judge Court’s October 21,
	
2009 Order, Coleman, 2010 WL 99000 (No. CIV S-90-0520
LKK JFM P), available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/2009_
Press_Releases/docs/Defendants_Pop_Reduction_Plan_
wExhibits.pdf.
74	 Coleman, 2010 WL 99000 at *1.
	
75	Defendants’ Response to Three-Judge Court’s October 21,
	
2009 Order, at ex.A, Coleman, 2010 WL 99000 (No. CIV S-900520 LKK JFM P).
76	 Id. at ex.A tbl.1.
	
77	 Clark Kelso, Achieving a Constitutional Level of Medical Care
	
in California’s Prisons: Thirteenth Tri-Annual Report of the
Federal Receiver’s Turnaround Plan of Action 6 (2010), available at http://www.cprinc.org/docs/court/T13_13th_
Tri-Annual20100114.pdf.
78	Plaintiffs’ Trial Exhibit 1012A, Coleman v. Schwarzenegger,
	
No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P, 2009 WL 2430820 (E.D. Cal.
Aug. 4, 2009).

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