June 6, 2011
Alameda County Prepares for Influx of Inmates as State Reduces Population
Alameda County’s incarceration system may struggle to support the coming influx of inmates this July as California shifts the supervision of its prisoners from state to local facilities in order to meet a court-ordered prison population reduction strategy.
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding in California’s 33 prisons has caused conditions that amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling ordered California to reduce its prison population by 32,000 over the next two years.
A process called “realignment” could satisfy this mandate by keeping future inmates convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual, non-serious crimes in county jails instead of sending them to state prison. In the meantime, some current inmates will be permanently shifted from federal prisons to local jails. These inmates will serve out their entire sentence in local jails, while other inmates with low-offence violations will be released early to ease the burden on the penal system...
LINK - BayCitizen.org
