KEEPING AMERICA'S PRISONS OVERCROWDED

Our nation's love affair with incarceration continues. In a case
before the Supreme Court, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is
arguing that judges have no right to tell states to reduce their
prison populations.

America's prisons, like many of our public schools, reflect our
country's most shameful and profound failings. Last month, the U.S.
Supreme Court took on one aspect of our nation's love affair with
incarceration.

In Schwarzenegger vs. Plata, the state of California has challenged a
federal court order under the Prison Reform Litigation Act, which
requires the state to reduce its prison population to deal with
overcrowding. The court found that overpopulation is directly
responsible for the failure of the California system to provide
inmates with adequate physical and mental health services. California
argues that the prison reduction order goes beyond the scope of the
statute and infringes on the state's power.

This case is likely to play out before the court and in the media as
a battle over states' rights in this case, the right of the state
of California to manage its own prison system and against the
encroachment of federal judges supplanting the judgment of elected
leaders. Indeed, 18 states including Texas have joined in a brief
supporting California and making this very argument.

But there's much more at stake in this case than the age-old "state
sovereignty vs. federal courts" story. In fact, the federal court's
prison reduction order is something of a last resort imposed only
after eight years in which California, while conceding the
unconstitutional overcrowding in its prison system, has failed to
reduce its prison population.

Built for 80,000 prisoners, the California corrections system houses
twice that number. In 2006, a report from a court-ordered receiver
determined that until the overpopulation problem was addressed, it
would be impossible to fix the prison's health care services.

But the California Legislature has failed to enact a plan to reduce
the prison population. There's no political gain to enacting reforms
that would release prisoners and create more humane conditions for
those who remain incarcerated.

And this is, in no small measure, a key to our dysfunctional prison
policies. The decisions we've made as a society about incarceration
are driven too often by politics and too little by professional
correctional expertise. Our shamefully bloated prison population is a
symptom of the problem. The United States incarcerates more than 2
million prisoners the vast majority African-Americans and Latinos,
and a disproportionate number for nonviolent drug offenses.

The fact that overcrowding undermines adequate health care to
prisoners and exacerbates negative mental health outcomes has been
well-known for decades. It's also well-established that prison
overcrowding endangers corrections officers and other personnel who
work in prisons. (In an extraordinary move, the organization
representing the 35,000 correctional officers in the California
system filed a brief on the side of the Plata plaintiffs, arguing
that overcrowded conditions make it impossible for corrections
officers to provide adequate care.)

Yet states throughout the country have plowed forward, imposing
draconian sentencing guidelines without ensuring adequate funding or
facilities to meet the needs created by such policies, which favor
warehousing convicts over providing drug-treatment, educational and
vocational-training programs.

States' rights come with responsibilities. The condition of our
prison system is a reflection of irresponsible state and federal
policies that have often been politically expedient but fiscally and
morally unsound.