Prisons on the brink
Howard Mintz, San Jose Mercury News
Issue date: 9/16/09 Section: News
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A gymnasium is a sea of bunk beds. The 213 inmates inside are quarantined on this day, the result of worries about a swine flu outbreak. In a room like this, there is nowhere for a virus to go but directly to another inmate never more than a foot or two away. The basketball hoops and theater stage are reminders that this decaying part of the prison was never meant to house prisoners.
Likewise, a "day room" once envisioned as a place for inmates to play cards or watch TV is stacked with bunk beds, 54 beds for 54 prisoners who have little room to stand. In one corner, there is a shower and a toilet. Large fans stir the fetid air.
"This is self-explanatory," says an inmate perched on a top bunk. "We're overcrowded."
The state prison here is far from the only overcrowded, dangerous and crumbling prison in California. But by most accounts, it is as good a place as any to illustrate why three federal judges last month took the extraordinary step of ordering California to come up with a plan to shed more than 40,000 inmates from its overcrowded prison system.
Many prison officials and law-abiding citizens have little sympathy for the more than 150,000 inmates crammed into the state's prisons, saying they already get some of the best treatment in the nation. State officials plan to appeal the judges' order to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the reality for California's prison system is that a powerful federal court has concluded it is violating the prisoners' constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Beyond that, the state simply can no longer afford its overcrowding problem, struggling to find $1.2 billion to shave from its prison budget.
The situation ensures the spotlight will remain on prisons such as Chino's, which has operated at or near 200 percent of its intended capacity, brimming with nearly 6,000 inmates in a facility designed 70 years ago for half that.
Even the stretches of this prison actually designed to house inmates appear bleakly overtaxed. Inside Madrone Hall, two inmates jam into 6-by-11-foot cells meant for a single bed. A second bed chained to the wall during the day is dropped to the floor at night, flat and tin-looking to earn the name "cookie sheet bed."
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