What to do about all those prisoners?

by Dennis Coday

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dcoday@ncronline.org

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Great blog post over on Commonweal: Fear-mongering from the Bench by Malcolm C. Young

Few recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been more vigorously contested, or hold more ominous implication, than Brown v. Plata [pdf], announced in May, in which the Court affirmed a ruling requiring California to release prisoners in order to reduce overcrowding in its prison system. ...

These hellish prisons were the fault of irresponsible legislators—legislators who chose to ignore the warnings of at least a dozen official reports over two decades—and the Supreme Court acted correctly in requiring California to correct such conditions. ...

Yet the narrow, 5–4 ruling was in fact anything but a slam dunk; and while those of us who agree with the majority may have won a battle, the war remains very much in question. Especially when you survey the weapons the other side deployed.

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