California’s Prison Crisis
Three photographs are part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in which the Supreme Court orders California to release more than 30,000 inmates from state prisons to reduce dangerous overcrowding. Looking at the photos, there should be no doubt that the conditions violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
In the first two, men are packed into what looks like a makeshift shelter, with just a few guards monitoring as many as 200 prisoners. The third photo shows man-sized cages in which prisoners needing mental health treatment are held until a bed opens up. One inmate, Justice Kennedy writes, was found standing “in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic.”
The state has two years to reduce the overcrowding. Whatever means it chooses, it needs to rethink laws and policies that keep a large number of people in prison for technical parole violations and others for minor, nonviolent crimes. Its limited prison space should be used for people who truly pose a threat to society.
The case, Brown v. Plata, grows out of two class-action lawsuits, one started in 1990 by seriously mentally ill prisoners, the other in 2001 by prisoners with serious medical conditions. In 2009, a panel of three federal judges ordered California to reduce its prison population to 110,000 from 156,000 (today there are more than 140,000). The system’s official capacity is 80,000.
In their ruling, the panel noted that 12 years after the first suit was brought — and despite 70 court orders for remedies — conditions had continued to deteriorate horribly. A special master appointed by the panel studied suicides in California prisons and found the rate was almost twice as high as the national average for prisons. Almost three-fourths of the suicides were “probably foreseeable or preventable” because they involved “some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention.”
California challenged the panel’s ruling in the Supreme Court — especially the need for a limit on the size of the prison population. In Monday’s ruling, Justice Kennedy affirmed the panel’s finding that overcrowding is the “primary cause” of “severe and unlawful mistreatment of prisoners through grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care,” leading to “needless suffering and death.”
In separate dissents, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. attack the court’s decision in terms so extreme they call for an answer. Justice Scalia accuses the majority of affirming “what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito warns that the majority makes a “dangerous error” in relying on the three-judge court’s finding that a large release of prisoners will not jeopardize public safety.
In fact, Justice Kennedy’s opinion is attentive to safety: California can give early release only to prisoners posing the least risk; it can divert low-risk offenders to community programs; and so on. And he bends over backward to let California decide how to solve the problem. The state retains the choice of how to reduce the overcrowding, through parole reform, construction of new prisons and otherwise. It can propose remedies not yet considered and ask the three-judge court for additional flexibility in using them.
But as Justice Kennedy reminds, if the Supreme Court did not impose a limit on California’s prison population, there would be an “unacceptable risk” of continuing violations “with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.” And that would defy the Constitution.
More Spending, Fewer F-35s
Pentagon spending must come down to reduce the deficit. But some military contractors and their Congressional enablers on the House Armed Services Committee are pushing as hard as they can in the wrong direction.
In February, Congress bowed to the Pentagon’s pleas and terminated work on an unneeded alternative engine for the overbudget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, at an estimated savings of $2 billion to $3 billion. Then the engine’s prime contractors, General Electric and Rolls-Royce, offered to pay next year’s development costs, hoping the Pentagon would then reconsider and buy their engine. By a huge bipartisan majority, the committee fell for it.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Howard McKeon, is an avowed foe of Pentagon cost-cutting. But Republicans who equate unaffordable spending with strong defense are only part of the problem. Robert Andrews, a Democrat, added language to next year’s military budget that would require the Pentagon to give the companies access to the information and equipment they need to keep testing the second engine. And making its goal clear, the committee voted to reopen the competition to the rejected engine in the likely event of rising costs for the Pratt & Whitney version the Pentagon prefers.
Competition can cut costs. But this competition has already been won by the Pratt & Whitney engine. Spending additional billions on continued development of the second version makes no sense. House members of both parties who favor a strong defense and lower deficits must strip out the alternate engine provisions when the authorization bill comes to the floor this week.
At the same time, we have to thank G.E. and Rolls-Royce for coming up with a great idea, which we hope Congress will embrace for future acquisitions: Contractors should pay a larger share of development costs. Too often companies win contracts with unrealistically low estimates, leading to huge cost overruns during development. And once the Pentagon has paid these development costs, it is reluctant to cancel systems it might never have bought had the real costs been known.
That has been the unhappy story of the F-35, whose initial selling point was its relatively cheap cost of $62 million per plane (in today’s dollars). Those costs have nearly doubled over the past decade. The nearly 2,500 F-35s the Pentagon plans to buy over the next two decades are now projected to cost around $382 billion.
Eliminating the alternate engine is part of the Pentagon’s strategy for containing the F-35’s soaring costs. G.E., Rolls-Royce and their Congressional allies should not be allowed to thwart that. The Pentagon needs to get this enormous program back under control.
Keep Chilean Patagonia Wild
An environmental review commission in the Aysén region of southern Chile has made a potentially disastrous decision, voting to approve the construction of five hydroelectric dams, two on the Baker River and three on the Pascua. The damage these dams would do to the environment is tremendous, and their construction — in a largely unspoiled natural haven — would open the way for further development, including more dams.
The Baker and Pascua Rivers flow into the wild fiords that thread their way along the southern Chilean coast. The dams would partially flood a national park as well as portions of a landscape that Chile had been hoping to have named a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The vote follows an environmental review that looked only at the immediate consequences of construction and not the long-term effects on the ecology of these watersheds or the downstream risks of damming short, violent, glacial rivers that are subject to abrupt outburst floods from the lakes above them. To deliver the power they would generate — some 2.75 gigawatts — Chile would have to build a 1,400-mile corridor of power lines to the north, creating the longest clear-cut on the planet.
There is no disputing Chile’s energy needs or the fact that it pays much more for electricity than any of its neighbors. But major studies have made it clear that Chile has extraordinary renewable energy sources, including solar, geothermal and wind power that could be developed with far less impact on the environment.
This is an early skirmish in a lengthy, hard-fought battle. A separate environmental review must be completed and approved for the transmission corridor. We hope it takes a more comprehensive look at the damage this project would cause. Perhaps then the Chilean government, which supports the dam project, will come to understand what many Chileans already know: that sacrificing Patagonia for power would be an irreparable mistake.
Nassau’s Extremely Cynical Makeover
Albany isn’t the only place where lawmakers are fighting to save a protected species, the ludicrous gerrymander. In Nassau County, the Republican Party has hacked away at the legislative map in a bid to keep its 11-to-8 majority by whatever squiggly lines necessary.
The Republicans’ move, led by Peter Schmitt, the presiding officer of the Nassau Legislature, astounded even those accustomed to sleazy power plays. On April 26, less than a month after the 2010 Census figures came out, and without public input, Mr. Schmitt and his cronies unveiled the new map. They said the county charter required them to redraw district lines immediately, ignoring the parts of the charter that call for a fair, deliberative process.
The map is a radical act of disenfranchisement, shifting more than 570,000 voters out of their home districts. It crams four incumbent Democrats into two districts. It tears through well-established geographic boundaries like the Five Towns and leaves minority voters stranded in Republican districts.
The map instantly became mired in a court battle and may not emerge in time for this year’s elections. But even though Mr. Schmitt may end up with less than he wanted — instead of an impregnable Republican fortress, just an egregious waste of lawmakers’ time and taxpayers’ money — his effort should be more proof of why New York and its counties need nonpartisan redistricting commissions that do their job in service of voters, not incumbents.
Nassau, with its long history of disenfranchising minority voters, needs all the democracy it can get. Note to Mr. Schmitt: Doesn’t your party have better things to do?
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