Lawyers for California Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration told a federal court panel on Monday that a plan to release almost 9,000 more inmates because of overcrowding would jeopardize public safety.
According to the
Los Angeles Times, the state's Corrections Department admits it likely won't be able to meet a June deadline next year for reducing prison overcrowding that's been upheld by the Supreme Court. The state has already reduced its inmate population to 119,000, down from 149,000 in 2009. But the state is under orders to cut its prison population to at least 110,000, a figure that state attorneys argued Monday may be hard to achieve.
"This is the latest round of delay tactics," said Don Specter, lead lawyer for the Prison Law Office, which brought the original class action suit over medical care that led to the federal court order.
Specter said state officials have long known they don’t expect to meet the prison population cap, "and now they're saying, we won't do anything else until the court orders it."
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