All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

Citing an overcrowded prison system that has led to inadequate health care for inmates, a panel of federal judges has ordered California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 over the next two years.
That reflects a roughly 27 percent cut from the current population of 150,000.

The New York Times, which has a PDF of the court order, reports that "judges said that reducing prison crowding in California was the only way to change what they called an unconstitutional prison health care system that causes one unnecessary death a week."

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, notes that "[t]he order cited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's own words when he proclaimed a state of emergency in the corrections system in 2006 and warned of substantial risk to prison staff, inmates and the general public, saying 'immediate action is necessary to prevent death and harm.'"

Judges gave state officials 45 days to come up with a plan for reducing the prison population; among their recommendations for doing so was lowering the number of nonviolent offenders who are incarcerated.

The judges said that "by changing parole practices and releasing some low-risk inmates to local custody, treatment programs or electronic monitoring, the prison population can be reduced 'without a meaningful adverse impact on public safety,'" the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

In an effort to reduce its crippling $26 billion budget gap, California had previously planned to reduce its prison population by 27,000, the New York Times reports. That decision was reversed after law enforcement and victims' rights groups raised objections.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," said CBS News Chief Legal Analyst and Legal Editor Andrew Cohen. "There are other states which have big problems with overcrowding in prisons, problems exacerbated by the recession, which is forcing state legislators to cut the criminal justice budget even as they send more people off to prison. Attorney General Eric Holder just this past week noted that one in 100 Americans is now in jail."

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Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq prisons in 2003, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison was insistent that all orders on interrogation practices came from the top down during the Bush administration on CBS News’ The Early Show this morning.

“These soldiers didn't design these techniques on their own…we were following orders,” Karpinski told Harry Smith. “We were bringing this to our chain of command and they were saying whatever the military intelligence tells you to do out there you are authorized to do."

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report finds that early roots of U.S. interrogation practices were being circulated through the CIA and the Pentagon as early as 2002.

The report also ties the interrogation policies of the Bush administration to abuse cases at Abu Ghraib prison as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After the scandal involving Abu Ghraib’s torture practices, Karpinski was demoted to colonel and has since retired.

Karpinski argued that there was a “clear” line between the techniques condoned by top level administration officials and the practices condemned in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

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Judging from the headlines this Good Friday morning, the Central Intelligence Agency has followed up on the White House’s pledge to close those odious “secret prisons” around the world; dark places were some of our terror suspects were water-boarded and otherwise tortured.

The New York Times played the story this way: “The Central Intelligence said Thursday that it would decommission the secret overseas prisons where it subjected Al Qaeda prisoners to brutal interrogation methods, bringing to a symbolic close the most controversial counterterrorism program of the Bush administration. But in a statement to employees, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, said agency officers who worked in the program “should not be investigated, let alone punished” because the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had declared their actions legal.”

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In Pennsylvania, a cost-saving exercise in private prisons has gone terribly wrong—two judges pleaded guilty Thursday to fraud after taking money in exchange for rulings that sent kids to a certain privately-run detention facility. Investigators now are trying to figure out whether and to what extent innocent young men and women were jailed in the scheme.

In Virginia, an untimely effort by Republican lawmakers to expand the death penalty in the Commonwealth faces a veto from Governor Timothy M. Kaine. Among the many other arguments against the measure, no doubt Gov. Kaine will point to the fact that capital cases are tremendously more expensive to the state than are cases which result only in the possibility of a life sentence without parole. Here’s how the Death Penalty Information Center’s Richard Dieter calculates it:

“A Maryland study concluded that the cost was about $37 million per execution. In Florida, the estimate was about $24 million per execution. In California, they are spending about $138 million per year on the death penalty. Considering that they only have one execution every two years, that amounts to a cost of over $250 million per execution.”

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